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Holmes Leaflets 

Poems and Prose Passages 
from 

O.W.HOLMES 



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HOLMES LEAFLETS 

POEMS AND PROSE PASSAGES 

FROM THE WORKS OF 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

FOR READING AND RECITATION 

COMPILED BY 

JOSEPHINE E. HODGDON 
ILLUSTRATED 




BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
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COPYRIGHT, 1872, BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

COPYRIGHT, 1S74, 1S75, AND J1877, BY JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO. 

COPYRIGHT, I9OO, I902, 1905, 1914, AND 1916, BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

COPYRIGHT, I903, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN & CO. 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 






INTRODUCTION TO THE LEAFLETS. 



" Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest 
men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the 
results of their learning and wisdom The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, 
impatient of interruptions, fenced by etiquette ; but the thought which they did not uncover to 
their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age." — 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

How can our young people be led to take pleasure in the writings of our 
best authors ? An attempt to answer this important inquiry is the aim of 
these Leaflets. It is proposed, by their use in the school and the family, to 
develop a love for the beautiful thoughts, the noble and elevating sentiments, 
that pervade the choicest literature, and thus to turn aside that flood of per- 
nicious reading which is deluging the children of our beloved country. It is 
hoped that they will prove effective instruments in securing the desired end, 
and an aid in the attainment of a higher mental and moral culture. 

Our best writers, intelligent teachers, and lecturers on literary subjects have 
given suggestions and material for this work, and rendered its realization 
possible. Those who, knowing the power of a good thought well expressed. 
have endeavored to popularize works of acknowledged merit by means ot 
copied extracts, marked passages, leaves torn from books, and other expen- 
sive and time-consuming expedients, will gladly welcome this new, convenient, 
and inexpensive arrangement of appropriate selections as helps to the prog- 
ress they are attempting to secure. This plan and the selections used are 
the outgrowth of experiences in the school-room; and their utility and adapta- 
tion to the proposed aims have been proved. 

By means of these leaflets, each teacher can have at command a larger range 
of authors than is otherwise possible. A few suggestions in regard to these 
Leaflets may not be amiss. 

1. They may be used for reading at sight and for silent reading. 

2. They may be employed for analysis of the author's meaning and lan- 
guage, which may well be made a prominent feature of the reading lesson, as 
it is the best preparation for a proper rendering of the passages given. 

3. They may be distributed and each pupil allowed to choose his own 
favorite selection. This may afterwards be used, as its character or the pupil's 
inclination suggests, for sentiment, essay, reading, recitation, or declamation. 

4. Mr. Longfellow's method, as mentioned in the sketch accompanying his 
poems, in this series of Leaflets, may be profitably followed, as it will promote 
a helpful interplay of thought between teacher and pupils, and lead uncon- 
sciously to a love and understanding of good authors. 

5. Short quotations may be given in answer to the daily roll-call. 

iii 



INTRODUCTION TO THE LEAFLETS. 

6. Some of the selections are especially adapted to responsive and chorus 
class-reading. 

7. The lyrical poems can be sung to some familiar tunes. 

8. The sketch which will be found with each series may serve as the founda- 
tion for essays on the author's life and works. 

9. The illustrations may be employed as subjects for language lessons, thus 
cultivating the powers of observation and expression. 

All these methods combined may be made to give pleasure to the pupils' 
friends, and make it feasible to entertain them oftener than is now the custom, 
and will create at the same time an interest in the school and a sympathy with 
the author whose works are the subjects of study. 

The foregoing is by no means a necessary order, and teachers will vary from 
it as their own appreciation of the intelligence of their pupils and the interest 
of the exercise shall suggest. The object to be kept in view is, pleasantly to 
introduce the works of our best authors to growing minds, and then to develop 
a taste for the best in literature, so that the world of books may become an un- 
failing source of inspiration and delight. J. E. H. 

iv 



CONTENTS. 



♦ 

PAGE 

Introductory Sketch. Oliver Wendell Holmes 7 

The Poet to the Children 11 

Hymn for the Class Meeting .13 

Lines . 15 

The Chambered Nautilus .......... 17 

The Living Temple 19 

The Two Armies 21 

Album Verses . 23 

Contentment 25 

The Faults of Conversation 27 

Old Ironsides 29 

Language 31, 32 

Our Yankee Girls 33 

Truths and Lies Comparable to Cubes and Spheres .... 35 

Ode for Washington's Birthday 37 

The Opening of the Piano 39 

The Love for the Ridiculous 41 

Lexington 43 

Union and Liberty 45 

Genius 47 

Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle 49 

Intellects 53 

To H. W. Longfellow 55 

The Flower of Liberty 57 

Army Hymn 59 

Specialists 61 

The Boys 63 

Under the Washington Elm, Cambridge 65 

The Allegory of Old Age 67 

The Promise 69 

A Ballad of the Boston Tea-Party 71 

v 



CONTENTS. 

PAoa 

Spring has Come 73 

Robinson of Leyden • 75 

The Comet 77 

Trees 79 

The Deacon's Masterpiece . . 81 

Social Distinctions 85 

Freedom, Our Queen 87 

The Two Streams 89 

The Front Door and Side Door to our Feelings 91 

The Last Charge 93 

The Seashore and the Mountains 95 

Boston Common. — Three Pictures 97 

Conversation 99 

Manners ....... 101 

Parting Hymn 103 

Breakfast Table Talk 105 

A Cluster of Quotations .,...101 

¥3 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 



HOLMES. 




ffiar€A/ /^2^^W 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

In December, 1879, the publishers of the " Atlantic Monthly " celebrated 
the seventieth year of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, by giving a breakfast in 
his honor and inviting to it many who had been associated with him in his 
literary life. The breakfast was not gi\en on his birthday. That was the 
29th of August. There is an old almanac of the year 1809 which belonged 
to Dr. Holmes's father, the Rev. Dr. Abiel Holmes, who was minister of the 

7 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

First Church in Cambridge ; against the date of August 29, there was writ- 
ten son b. In those days blotting paper was not used, but on every desk 
stood a pepper-box of sand, and to dry the ink one sprinkled sand upon the 
freshly written lines. On these four letters which told more than seventy 
years ago that a child was born to the Cambridge minister, one can still see 
the shining grains of sand which never have been rubbed off. If you hold 
the paper in the light the sand sparkles. When the paper of that old alma- 
nac fhall have crumbled to dust, the little grains of sand, if they could be 
preserved, would still sparkle in the sun. 

That is much like the lasting brightness of Dr. Holmes's poetry and prose. 
The people who gathered about the breakfast table to honor the poet laughed 
merrily over the witty things that were said there; their lips trembled, too, 
over the touches of pathos, for humor and pathos follow each other as sun- 
shine and cloud; they both spring from feeling, and the charm of Dr. Holmes's 
writing is in the quickness with which he smiles with those who smile, and 
weeps with those who weep. He is quick, too, to respond with indignation 
at wrong and with applause at what is heroic and honest. 

The house in which Dr. Holmes was born stood in Cambridge, near the 
Gymnasium and the Law School of Harvard University. Here, in the early 
days of the War for Independence, was the headquarters of General Arte- 
mas Ward and of the Committee of Safety, and tradition says that on the 
steps of the house stood President Langdon of Harvard College, and prayed 
for the men who halted there a moment as they marched to throw up in- 
trenchinents on Bunker Hill on the night of June 16, 1775. Dr. Holmes's 
father carried forward the fame of the house when he wrote there his " Amer- 
ican Annals," the first careful record of American history written after the 
war, and there Dr. Holmes himself, when a young man, Avrote the stirring 
lines " Old Ironsides." He left the old house long since, and now lives in 
Boston, by the side of Charles River; but every once in a while he has gone 
back in memory and imagination to the old house, and has written both verse 
and prose in its honor. At the end of his pleasant account of the old house 
in the " Poet at the Breakfast Table," he writes : "I do not know what 
special gifts have been granted or denied me ; but this I know, that I am like 
so many others of my fellow-creatures, that when I smile, I feel as if they 
must; when I cry I think their eyes fill; and it always seems to me that when 
I am most truly myself I come nearest to them and am surest of being lis- 
tened to by the brothers and sisters of the larger family into which I was born 
so long ago." The old house was torn down in 1884. 

Dr. Holmes began early to wake the laughter and smiles of others. Just 
after he had left college he wrote " The Spectre Pig," " The Dorchester 
Giant," "Evening, by a Tailor," and other of his amusing poems. He 
wrote also at that time his tender lines on "The Cambridge Churchyard" 
and other lyrics; but the gaiety of youth sparkled in almost all of his work 
at that time. He was not an idler. Taking up first the study of law, he soon 
changed it for that of medicine, and then was appointed a professor of medi- 

8 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

cine. Thus he had his title of Doctor, and for many years he wrote and 
taught steadily in his profession. At the breakfast given to him, President 
Eliot of Harvard University said : " I think that none of us can understand 
the meaning and scope of Dr. Holmes's writings unless we have observed that 
the daily work of his life has been to study and teach a natural science, — 
the noble science of anatomy. It is his to know with absolute exactness the 
form of every bone in this wonderful body of ours, the course of every ar- 
tery and vein and nerve, the form and function of every muscle; and not only 
to know it, but to describe it with a fascinating precision and enthusiasm. 
When I read his writings 1 find the traces of this life-work of his on every 
page." 

Thus, while there were readers everywhere who knew Dr. Holmes only as a 




• ' — . . - 



?--&6fe: 



The Old Gambrel-roofed House. 

witty or graceful poet, there were many young men who knew him chiefly as 
a valued teacher. President Eliot thinks he wrote poetry better because he 
taught anatomy. We think so too, and that he taught better for writing poetry 
as he did. He knew the worth of close application to his science, and he 
knew that one works best who lets his heart have fullest play. We often say 
of a doctor that he succeeds because he has insight, and thus that some are 
born doctors. Dr. Holmes had this insight ; he looked not only into the won- 
drous mechanism of the human body, but he perceived, as a poet does, the 
mingled web and woof of the human soul. So, after many years of profes- 
sional work and occasional poems, he began to use in literature the knowledge 
which his life of study and feeling had brought him. He was known to his 
friends as a bright and joyous companion, one who was welcomed at the 

9 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

table. He suddenly spread a table of his own for the whole world, beginning 
in " The Atlantic Monthly " a series of papers called " The Autocrat of 
the Breakfast Table." He imagined himself at a boarding-house with vari- 
ous people gathering at breakfast, and he wrote as if he were talking, with 
interruptions now and then from the listeners. He was so life-like in his 
story that people came to know the different boarders as if they were real per- 
sons, and yet they said but little at the table ; the talk all flowed from the 
Autocrat, who poured forth a steady stream of prose and verse. From that 
time Dr. Holmes's fame grew rapidly, and his books, appearing first in the 
magazine, were read and re-read by thousands. Every one wanted him at 
their own table, and whenever there was a holiday, or a great dinner to some 
honored guest, or a gathering of Dr. Holmes's college class, nothing would 
do but the poet must sing his song. He was always ready, always fresh, and 
each new occasional poem has made him the more welcome. 

At the breakfast in his honor he read his lines called " The Iron Gate," 
in which he says : — 

" Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers, 
Sits by the raked up ashes of the past, 
Spreads its thin hands above the whitening embers 
That warm its creeping life-blood till the last. " 

Dr. Holmes's youthfulness was never lost, but among the tenderest of hia 
later poems are those which recall his early days. That is the poet's charming 
power, to keep us always in mind of the springs of life, to make the old new, 
and the dead live again. He died full of years, October 7, 1894. 

10 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 







THE POET TO THE CHILDREN. 

DR. HOLMES'S LETTER TO THE SCHOOL CHILDREN OF CINCINNATI, OHIO, 
ON THEIR CELEBRATION OF HIS SEVENTY-FIRST YEAR. 

Boston, November 20, 1880. 

My dear young Friends, — You are doing me great honor by commit- 
ting some of my lines to memory, and bringing me so kindly into remembrance 
If I had known how much was to be made of my verses, I should have bee« 
more thoughtful and more careful in writing them. I began writing and print- 
ing my poems at an age when many are far advanced in wisdom, but I was 
boyish and immature. And so it happens that some productions of mine got 
established in my books which I look upon now as green fruit, which had bet- 
ter been left ungathered. I can trust the keen intelligence of my young 
readers to discover which these were. After all, it sometimes happens that 
youthful readers find a certain pleasure in writings which their authors find 
themselves to have outgrown, and shake their gray heads over as if they ought 
to have written like old men when they were boys. So, if any of you can 
laugh over any of my early verses, unbutton your small jackets and indulge in 
that pleasing convulsion to your heart's content. 

But I sincerely hope that you will find something better in my pages, and if 
you will remember me by "The Chambered Nautilus," or "The Promise," 
or " The Living Temple," your memories will be a monument I shall think 
more of than of any of bronze or marble. 

With the best wishes for your happy future, I am your friend, 

Oliver Wendell Holmes. 






Sni'iBiSr-*' 



11 



HOLMES. 




HYMN FOR THE CLASS-MEETING. 

Thou Gracious Power, whose mercy lends 
The light of home, the smile of friends, 
Our gathered flock thine arms infold 
As in the peaceful days of old. 

Wilt thou not hear us while we raise, 
In sweet accord of solemn praise, 
The voices that have mingled long 
In joyous flow of mirth and song? 

For all the blessings life has brought, 
For all its sorrowing hours have taught, 
For all we mourn, for all we keep, 
The hands we clasp, the loved that sleep ; 

The noontide sunshine of the past, 
Those brief, bright moments fading fast, 
The stars that gild our darkening years, 
The twilight ray from holier spheres ; 

We thank thee, Father! let thy grace 
Our narrowing circle still embrace, 
Thy mercy shed its heavenly store, 
Thy peace be with us evermore! 
13 



HOLMES. 



LINES. 



I 'm ashamed, — that 's the fact, — 

it 's a pitiful case, — 
Won't any kind classmate get up in 

ray place? 
Just remember how often I 've risen 

before, — 
I blush as I straighten my legs on the 

floor! 

There are stories, once pleasing, too 

many times told, — 
There are beauties once charming, too 

fearfully old, — 
There are voices we 've heard till we 

know them so well, 
Though they talked for an hour 

they 'd have nothing to tell. 

Yet, Classmates ! Friends ! Brothers ! 
dear blessed old boys ! 

Made one by a lifetime of sorrows 
and joys, 

What lips have such sounds as the 
poorest of these, 

Though honeyed, like Plato's, by musi- 
cal bees? 

What voice is so sweet and what 

greeting so dear 
As the simple, warm welcome that 

waits for us here ? 



The love of our boyhood still breathes 

in its tone, 
And our hearts throb the answer, 

" He 's one of our own ! " 

Nay ! count not our numbers ; some 

sixty we know, 
But these are above, and those under 

the snow ; 
And thoughts are still mingled where- 

ever we meet 
For those we remember with those 

that we greet. 

We have rolled on life's journey, — 
how fast and how far ! 

One round of humanity's many- 
wheeled car, 

But up-hill and down -hill, through 
rattle and rub, 

Old, true Twenty-niners ! we 've stuck 
to our hub ! 

While a brain lives to think, or a 

bosom to feel, 
We will cling to it still like the spokes 

of a wheel ! 
And age, as it chills us, shall fasten 

the tire 
That youth fitted round in his circle 

of fire ! 










■ = ■ iL'i xi; . 



15 



HOLMES. 



THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS. 



This is the ship of pearl, which, poets 
feign, 
Sails the unshadowed main, — 
The venturous bark that flings 
On the sweet summer wind its purpled 

wings 
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren 
sings, 
And coral reefs lie bare, 
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun 
their streaming hair. 

Its webs of living gauze no more un- 
furl; 
Wrecked is the ship of pearl! 
And every chambered cell, 
Where its dim dreaming life was wont 

to dwell, 
As the frail tenant shaped his growing 
shell, 
Before thee lies revealed, — 
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless 
crypt unsealed! 

Year after year beheld the silent toil 
That spread his lustrous coil; 
Still, as the spiral grew, 

He left the past year's dwelling for 
the new, 



Stole with soft step its shining arch? 

way through, 
Built up its idle door, 
Stretched in his last-found home, and 

knew the old no more. 

Thanks for the heavenly message 

brought by thee, 

Child of the wandering sea, 

Cast from her lap, forlorn ! 

From thy dead lips a clearer note is 

born 
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed 
horn ! 
While on mine ear it rings, 
Through the deep caves of thought X 
hear a voice that sings : — 

Build thee more stately mansions, 
my soul, 
As the swift seasons roll ! 
Leave thy low-vaulted past ! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the 

last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome 
more vast, 
Till thou at length art free, 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's 
unresting sea ! 







17 



HOLMES. 




THE LIVING TEMPLE. 



Not in the world of light alone, 
Where God has built his blazing 

throne, 
Nor yet alone in earth below, 
"With belted seas that come and go, 
And endless isles of sunlit green, 
Is all thy Maker's glory seen: 
Look in upon thy wondrous frame, — 
Eternal wisdom still the same! 

The smooth, soft air with pulse-like 

waves 
Flows murmuring through its hidden 

caves, 
Whose streams of brightening purple 

rush, 
Fired with a new and livelier blush, 
While all their burden of decay 
The ebbing current steals away, 
And red with Nature's flame they 

start 
From the warm fountains of the heart. 

No rest that throbbing slave may ask, 
Forever quivering o'er his task, 
While far and wide a crimson jet 
Leaps forth to fill the woven net 
Which in unnumbered crossing tides 
The flood of burning life divides, 



Then, kindling each decaying part 
Creeps back to find the throbbing 
heart. 

But warmed with that unchanging 

flame 
Behold the outward moving frame, 
Its living marbles jointed strong 
With glistening band and silvery 

thong, 
And linked to reason's guiding reins 
By myriad rings in trembling chains, 
Each graven with the threaded zone 
Which claims it as the Master's 



See how yon beam of seeming white 
Is braided out of seven-hued light, 
Yet in those lucid globes no ray 
By any chance shall break astray. 
Hark how the rolling surge of sound, 
Arches and spirals circling round, 
Wakes the hushed spirit through thine 

ear 
With music it is heaven to hear. 

Then mark the cloven sphere thaf 

holds 
All thought in its mysterious folds ; 



19 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 



That feels sensation's faintest thrill, 
And flashes forth the sovereign will ; 
Think on the stormy world that dwells 
Locked in its dim and clustering 

cells! 
The lightning gleams of power it 

sheds 
Along its hollow glassy threads ! 



O Father! grant thy love divine 
To make these mystic temples thine ! 
When wasting age and wearying strife 
Have sapped the leaning walls of life, 
When darkness gathers over all, 
And the last tottering pillars fall, 
Take the poor dust thy mercy warms, 
And mould it into heavenly forms .' 



20 




HOLMES. 



THE TWO ARMIES. 



As Life's unending column pours, 
Two marshalled hosts are seen, — 

Two armies on the trampled shores 
That Death flows black between. 

One marches to the drum-beat's roll, 
The wide-mouthed clarion's bray, 

And bears upon a crimson scroll, 
" Our glory is to slay.'* 

One moves in silence by the stream, 
With sad, yet watchful eyes, 

Calm as the patient planet's gleam 
That walks the clouded skies. 

Along its front no sabres shine, 
No blood-red pennons wave; 

Its banner bears the single line, 
" Our duty is to save." 

For those no death-bed's lingerino; 
shade; 

At Honor's trumpet-call, 
With knitted brow and lifted blade 

In Glory's arms they fall. 

For these no clashing falchions bright, 

No stirring battle-cry; 
The bloodless stabber calls by night, — 

Each answers, "Here ami!" 



For those the sculptor's laurelled 
bust, 

The builder's marble piles, 
The anthems pealing o'er their dust 

Through long cathedral aisles. 

For these the blossom-sprinkled turf 
That floods the lonely graves 

When Spring rolls in her sea-green 
surf 
In flowery-foaming waves. 

Two paths lead upward from below, 

And angels wait above, 
Who count each burning life-drop's 
flow, 

Each falling tear of Love. 

Though from the Hero's bleeding 
breast 

Her pulses Freedom drew, 
Though the white lilies in her crest 

Sprang from that scarlet dew, — 

While Valor's haughty champions 
wait 
Till all their scars are shown, 
Love walks unchallenged through the 
gate, 
To sit beside the Throne! 



-^ 



W 



21 



HOLMES. 




ALBUM VERSES. 



When Eve had led her lord away, 
And Cain had killed his brother, 

The stars and flowers, the poets say, 
Agreed with one another 

To cheat the cunning tempter's art, 
And teach the race its duty, 

By keeping on its wicked heart 
Their eyes of light and beauty. 

A million sleepless lids, they say, 
Will be at least a warning; 

And so the flowers would watch by 
day, 
The stars from eve to morning. 

On hill and prairie, field and lawn, 
Their dewy eyes upturning, 

The flowers still watch from redden- 
ing dawn 
Till western skies are burning:. 



Alas ! each hour of aayright tells 
A tale of shame so crushing, 

That some turn white as sea-bleached 
sheils, 
And some are always blushing. 

But when the patient stars look down 
On all their light discovers, 

The traitor's smile, the murderer's 
frown, 
The lips of lying lovers, 

They try to shut their saddening eyes, 

And in the vain endeavor 
We see them twinkling in the skies, 

And so they wink forever. 

^S&flLsaSt ..... 



Wkj® 




HOLMES. 



CONTENTMENT. 



' Man wants but little here below. 



Little T ask; my wants are few; 

I only wish a hut of stone, 
(A very plain brown stone will 
do,) 
That I may call my own ; — 
And close at hand is such a one, 
In yonder street that fronts the sun. 

Plain food is quite enough for me; 

Three courses are as good as ten; — 
If Nature can subsist on three, 

Thank Heaven for three. Amen! 
I always thought cold victual nice ; — 
My cho ; ce would be vanilla-ice. 

I care not much for gold or land ; — 
Give me a mortgage here and 
there, — 
Some good bank-stock, some note of 
hand, 
Or trifling railroad share, — 
I only ask that Fortune send 
A little more than I shall spend. 

Honors are silly toys, I know, 

And titles are but empty names ; 
I would, perhaps, be Plenipo, — 

But only near St. James ; 
I 'm very sure I should not care 
To fill our Gubernator's chair. 

Jewels are bawbles ; 't is a sin 

To care for such unfruitful things ; — 
One good-sized diamond in a pin, — 

Some, not so large, in rings, — 
A ruby, and a pearl, or so, 
Will do for me ; — I laujih at show. 



My dame should dress in cheap attire; 
(Good, heavy silks are never 
dear;) — 
I own perhaps I might desire 

Some shawls of true Cashmere, — 
Some marrowy crapes of China silk, 
Liike wrinkled skins on scalded milk. 

I would not have the horse I drive 
So fast that folks must stop anc 
stare ; 
An easy gait — two, forty- five — 
Suits me; I do not care ; — 
Perhaps, for just a single spurt, 
Some seconds less would do no hurt. 

Of pictures, I should like to own 
Titians and Raphaels three or 
four, — 
I love so much their style and tone, — 

One Turner, and no more, 
(A landscape, — foreground golden 

dirt, — 
The sunshine painted with a squirt.) 

Of books but few, — some fifty score 
For daily use, and bound for wear; 
The rest upon an upper floor ; — 

Some little luxury there 
Of red morocco's gilded gleam, 
And vellum rich as country cream. 

Busts, cameos, gems, — such things 
as these, 
Which others often show for pride, 
I value for their power to please, 
And selfish churls deride ; — 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 



One Stradivarius, I confess, 
Two Meerschaums, I would fain pos- 
sess. 

Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not 
learn 
Nor ape the glittering upstart 
fool ; — 
Shall not carved tables serve my turn, 
But all must be of buhl ? 



Give grasping pomp its double share,— 
I ask but one recumbent chair. 

Thus humble let me live and die, 

JS T or long for Midas' golden touch; 
If Heaven more generous gifts 
deny, 
I shall not mi>s them much, — 
Too grateful for the blessing lent 
Of simple tastes and mind content ! 





26 



HOLMES. 



THE FAULTS OF CONVERSATION. 

What are the great faults of conversation ? Want of ideas, want of words, 
want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you think. I don't doubt 
k, but I will tell you what I have found spoil more good talks than anything 
else; — long arguments on special points between people who differ on the funda- 
mental principles upon which these points depend. No men can have satis- 
factory relations with each other until they have agreed on certain ultimata of 
belief not to be disturbed in ordinary conversation, and unless they have sense 
enough to trace the secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs 
to their source. In short, just as a written constitution is essential to the best 
social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable talk 
between two persons. Talking is like playing on the harp ; there is as much 
in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them 
to bring out their music. 

Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in your minds? 
Let me lay down the law upon the subject. Life and language are alike sa- 
cred. Homicide and verbicide — that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal 
results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life — are alike forbidden. Man- 
slaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man's laughter, 
which is the end of the other. A pun is prima facie an insult to the person 
you are talking with. It implies utter indifference to or sublime contempt for 
his remarks, no matter how serious. I speak of total depravity, and one says 
all that is written on the subject is deep raving. I have committed my self- 
respect by talking with such a person. I should like to commit him, but can- 
not, because he is a nuisance. Or I speak of geological convulsions, and he 
asks me what was the cosine of Noah's ark ; also, whether the Deluge was not 
a deal linger than any modern inundation. 

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were 
given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the 
facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, 
return a verdict of justifiable homicide. Thus, in a case lately decided before 
Miller, J., Doe presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of 
suffering humanity. Roe replied by asking, When charity was like a top? It 
was in evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence. Roe then said, 
" When it begins to hum. " Doe then — and not till then — struck Roe, and 
his head happening to hit a bound volume of the " Monthly Rag-bag and 
Stolen Miscellany," intense mortification ensued, with a fatal result. The 
chief laid down his notions of the law to his brother justices, who unanimously 
replied, "Jest so." The chief rejoined, that no man should jest so without 
being punished for it, and charged for the prisoner, who was acquitted, and 

27 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 

the pun ordered to be burned by the sheriff. The bound volume was forfeited 
as a deodand, but not claimed. 

People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the rail- 
road tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick 
may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism. — 
From The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 

28 




HOLMES. 



OLD IRONSIDES. 

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down I 

Long has it waved on high, 
And many an eye has danced to see 

That banner in the sky ; 
Beneath it rung the battle shout, 

And burst the cannon's roar; — 
The meteor of the ocean air 

Shall sweep the clouds no more ! 

Her deck, once red with heroes' blood, 

Where knelt the vanquished foe, 
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood, 

And waves were white below, 
No more shall feel the victor's tread, 

Or know the conquered knee ; — 
The harpies of the shore shall pluck 

The eagle of the sea ! 

O better that her shattered hulk 

Should sink beneath the wave ; 
Her thunders shook the mighty deep, 

And there should be her grave ; 
Nail to the mast her holy flag, 

Set every threadbare sail, 
And give her to the god of storms, 

The lightning and the gale ! 




29 



HOLMES. 



LANGUAGE. 



Some words on language may be 
well applied, 
And take them kindly, though they 

touch your pride ; 
Words lead to things; a scale is more 

precise, — 
Coarse speech, bad grammar, swear- 
ing, drinking, vice. 
Our cold Northeaster's icy fetter 

clips 
The native freedom of the Saxon lips; 
See the brown peasant of the plastic 

South, 
How all his passions play about his 

mouth ! 
With us, the feature that transmits the 

soul, 
A frozen, passive, palsied breathing- 
hole. 
The crampy shackles of the plough- 
boy's walk 
Tie the small muscles when he strives 

to talk ; 
Not all the pumice of the polished 

town 
Can smooth this roughness of the 

barnyard down; 
Rich, honored, titled, he betrays his 

race 
By this one mark, — he 's awkward in 

the face ; — 
Nature's rude impress, long before he 

knew 
The sunny street that holds the sifted 

few. 
It can't be helped, though, if we 're 

taken young, 
We gain some freedom of the lips and 

tongue ; 
But school and college often try in 

vain 
To break the padlock of our boyhood's 

chain: 



One stubborn word will prove this 
axiom true, — 

No quondam rustic can enunciate 
view. 
A few brief stanzas may be well em- 
ployed 

To speak of errors we can all avoid. 

Learning condemns beyond the 

reach of hope 
The careless lips that speak of soap 

for soap ; 
Her edict exiles from her fair abode 
The clownish voice that utters road 

for road : 
Less stern to him who calls his coat a 

coat, 
And steers his boat, believing it a 

boat, 
She pardoned one, our classic city's 

boast, 
Who said at Cambridge, most instead 

of most, 
But knit her brows and stamped her 

angry foot 
To hear a Teacher call a loot a root. 

Once more; speak clearly, if you 

speak at all ; 
Carve every word before you let it 

fall ; 
Don't, like a lecturer or dramatic 

star, 
Try over hard to roll the British R ; 
Do put your accents in the proper 

spot ; 
Don't, — let me beg you, — don't say 

"How?" for " What?" 
And, when you stick on conversation's 

burrs, 
Don't strew your pathway with those 

dreadful urs. 
From A Rhymed Lesson. 



£1 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 



LANGUAGE. 

Language! — the blood of the soul, Sir! into which our thoughts run and 
out of which they grow! We know what a word is worth here in Boston. 
Young Sam Adams got up on the stage at Commencement, out at Cambridge 
there, with his gown on, the Governor and Council looking on in the name of 
his Majesty, King George the Second, and the girls looking down out of the 
galleries, and taught people how to spell a word that was n't in the Colonial 
dictionaries! R-e,re, s-i-s, sis, L-a-n-c-e, tance, Resistance! That was in '48, 
and it was a good many years before the Boston boys began spelling it with 
their muskets ; — but when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old 
bedridden women in the English almshouses heard every syllable ! Yes, yes, 
yes, — it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the class 
so far along that it could spell those two hard words, Lndependence and Union ! 
I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to 
get a new word into a language that is worth speaking. We know what lan- 
guage means too well here in Boston to play tricks with it. We never make a 
new word till we have made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! 

From The Professor at the Breakfast Table. 




SONS OF LIBE RTY 17 6 6 
(INDEPENDENCE opoukCOUNTRY 

[[Hi - l.-Z.^. g./iiililllli ili'.;! 



HOLMES, 




OUR YANKEE GIRLS. 



Let greener lands and bluer skies, 

If such the wide earth shows, 
With fairer cheeks and brighter eyes, 

Match us the star and rose ; 
The winds that lift the Georgian's 
veil, 

Or wave Circassia's curls, 
Waft to their shores the sultan's 
sail, — 

Who buys our Yankee girls? 

The gay grisette, whose fingers touch 

Love's thousand chords so well; 
The dark Italian, loving much, 

But more than one can tell; 
And England's fair-haired, blue-eyt-d 
dame, 

Who binds her brow with pearls; — 
Ye who have seen them, can they 
shame 

Our own sweet Yankee girls? 



And what if court or castle vaunt 

Its children loftier hern? — 
Who heeds the silken tassel's flaunt 

Beside the golden corn ? 
They ask not for the dainty toil 

Of ribboned knights and earls, 
The daughters of the virgin 
soil, 

Our freeborn Yankee girls! 

By every hill whose stately pines 

Wave their dark arms above 
The home where some fair being 
shines, 

To warm the wilds with love, 
From barest rock to bleakest shore 

Where farthest sail unfurls, 
That stars and stripes are streaming 
o'er, — 

God bless our Yankee girls! 



S3 



HOLMES, 




TRUTHS AND LIES COMPARABLE TO CUBES AND SPHERES. 

When we are as yet small children, long before the time when those two 
grown ladies offer us the choice of Hercules, there comes up to us a youthful 
angel, holding in his right hand cubes like dice, and in his left spheres like 
marbles. The cubes are of stainless ivory, and on each is written in letters of 
gold — Truth. The spheres are veined and streaked and spotted beneath, 
with a dark crimson flush above, where the light falls on them, and in a cer- 
tain aspect you can make out upon every one of them the three letters L, I, E. 
The child to whom they are offered very probably clutches at both. The 
spheres are the most convenient things in the world ; they roll with the least 
possible impulse just where the child would have them. The cubes will not 
roll at all ; they have a great talent for standing still, and always keep right 
side up. But very soon the young philosopher finds that things which roll so 
easily are very apt to roll into the wrong corner, and to get out of his way 
when he most wants them, while he always knows where to find the others, 
which stay where they are left. Thus he learns — thus we learn — to drop the 
streaked and speckled globes of falsehood and to hold fast the white angular 
blocks of truth. But then comes Timidity, and after her Good-Nature, and 
last of all Polite Behavior, all insisting that truth must roll, or nobody can do 
anything with it ; and so the first with her coarse rasp, and the second with 
her broad file, and the third with her silken sleeve, do so round off and smooth 
and polish the snow-white cubes of truth, that, when they have got a little 
dingy by use, it becomes hard to tell them from the rolling spheres of false- 
hood. — From The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 



35 



HOLMES. 




ODE FOR WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY. 



CELEBRATION OF THE MERCANTILE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, FEB. 22, 1356. 



Welcome to the day returning, 

Dearer still as ages flow, 
While the torch of Faith is burning, 

Long as Freedom's altars glow ! 
See the hero whom it gave us 

Slumbering on a mother's breast ; 
For the arm he stretched to save us, 

Be its morn forever blest! 

Hear the tale of youthful glory, 

While of Britain's rescued band 
Friend and foe repeat the story, 

Spread his fame o'er sea and land, 
Where the red cross, proudly stream- 
ing* 

Flaps above the frigate's deck, 
Where the golden lilies, gleaming, 

Star the watch-towers of Quebec. 

Look! The shadow on the dial 

Marks the hour of deadlier strife ; 
Days of terror, years of trial, 

Scourge a nation into life. 
Lo, the youth, become her leader! 

All her baffled tyrants yield ; 
Through his arm the Lord hath freed 
her; 

Crown him on the tented field! 



Yain is Empire's mad temptation! 

Not for him an earthly crown ! 
He whose sword hath freed a nation 

Strikes the offered sceptre down. 
See the throneless Conqueror seated, 

Ruler by a people's choice ; 
See the Patriot's task completed ; 

Hear the Father's dying voice! 

" By the name that you inherit, 

By the sufferings you recall, 
Cherish the fraternal spirit; 

Love your country first of all! 
Listen not to idle questions 

If its bands may be untied; 
Doubt the patriot whose suggestions 

Strive a nation to divide! " 

Father! We, whose ears have tingled 

With the discord-notes of shame, 
We, whose sires their blood have min- 
gled 

In the battle's thunder-flame, 
Gathering, while this holy morning 

Lights the land from sea to sea, 
Hear thy counsel, heed thy warn- 
ing; 

Trust us, while we honor thee ! 



37 



HOLMES. 



THE OPENING OF THE PIANO. 

Tn the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen, 
Wi£ iS^brd-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green, 
At the sid°e toward the sunset, with the window on its right, 
Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night ! 

Ah me ! how I remember the evening when it came ! 
What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame, 
When the wondrous box was opened that had come from over seas, 
With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of ivory keys ! 

Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy ; 

For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy, 

Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal way, > 

But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, « Now, Mary, pla, . 

For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm ; 
She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm 
In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills, 
Or carolling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills. 

So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to P^ase 
Sat down to the new « Clementi," and struck the glittering ke> s. 
Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye g^-; 
As, floating from lip and finger, arose the « Vesper H } mn. 

-Catherine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red 

(Wedded since, and a widow, -something like ten years dead,) 

Hearing a crush of music such as none before, 

Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door. 

Tust as the " Jubilate " in threaded whisper dies, 
« O ien it 1 open it, lady 1 " the little maiden cries, 

^r she thought 't was a singing creature caged in a box she heard,) 
»« Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the bird! 




HOLMES. 



THE LOVE FOR THE RIDICULOUS. 

It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to indulge his love for the 
ridiculous. People laugh with him just so long as he amuses them ; but if he 
attempts to be serious, they must still have their laugh, and so they laugh at 
him. There is in addition, however, a deeper reason for this than would at 
first appear. Do you know that you feel a little superior to every man who 
makes you laugh, whether by making faces or verses ? Are you aware that 
you have a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you condescend so far as 
to let him turn somersets, literal or literary, for your royal delight ? Now if 
a man can only be allowed to stand on a dais, or raised platform, and look 
down on his neighbor who is exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right! — 
first-rate performance! — and all the rest of the fine phrases. But if all at 
once the performer asks the gentleman to come upon the floor, and, stepping 
upon the platform, begins to talk down at him, — ah, that was n't in the pro- 
gramme! 

I have never forgotten what happened when Sydney Smith — who, as 
everybody knows, was an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman, every 
inch of him — ventured to preach a sermon on the Duties of Royalty. The 
"Quarterly," "so savage and tartarly," came down upon him in the most 
contemptuous style, as " a joker of jokes," a " diner-out of the first water," 
in one of his own phrases ; sneering at him, insulting him, as nothing but a 
toady of a court, sneaking behind the anonymous, would ever have been 
mean enough to do to a man of his position and genius, or to any decent per- 
son even. — If I were giving advice to a young fellow of talent, with two or 
three facets to his mind, I would tell him by all means to keep his wit in the 
background until after he had made a reputation by his more solid qualities. 
And so to an actor : Hamlet first, and Bob Logic afterwards, if you like; but 
don't think, as they say poor Liston used to, that people will be ready to allow 
that you can do anything great with Macbeth's dagger after flourishing about 
with Paul Pry's umbrella. Do you know, too, that the majority of men look 
upon all who challenge their attention, — for a while, at least, — as beggars 
and nuisances? They always try to get off as cheaply as they can ; and the 
cheapest of all things they can give a literary man — pardon the forlorn pleas- 
antry ! — is the funny-hox\Q. That is all very well so far as it goes, but satis- 
fies no man, and makes a good many angry, as I told you on a former occa- 
sion. — From The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 

41 



HOLMES. 



LEXINGTON. 



Slowly the mist o'er the meadow 
was creeping, 
Bright on the dewy buds glistened 
the sun, 
When from his couch, while his chil- 
dren were sleeping, 
Rose the bold rebel and shouldered 
his gun. 
"Waving her golden veil 
Over the silent dale, 
Blithe looked the morning on cottage 
and spire; 
Hushed was his parting sigh, 
While from his noble eye 
Flashed the last sparkle of liberty's 
fire. 

On the smooth green where the fresh 
leaf is springing 
Calmly the first-born of glory have 
met ; 
Hark! the death-volley around them 
is ringing! 
Look ! with their life-blood the 
young grass is wet ! 
Faint is the feeble breath, 
Murmuring low in death, 
" Tell to our sons how their fathers 
have died "; 
Nerveless the iron hand, 
Raised for its native land, 
Lies by the weapon that gleams at its 
side. 

Over the hillsides the wild knell is 
tolling, 
From their far hamlets the yeo- 
manry come ; 

As through the storm-clouds the thun- 
der-burst rolling, 



Circles the beat of the musterino 

o 

drum. 
Fast on the soldier's path 
Darken the waves of wrath, 
Long have they gathered and loud 
shall they fall ; 
Red glares the musket's flash, 
Sharp rings the rifle's crash, 
Blazing and clanging from thicket and 
wall. 

Gayly the plume of the horseman was 
dancing. 
Never to shadow his cold brojv 
again ; 
Proudly at morning the war-steed wad 
prancing, 
Reeking and panting he droops Ob 
the rein ; 
Pale is the lip of scorn, 
Voiceless the trumpet horn, 
Torn is the silken-fringed red cross 
on high ; 
Many a belted breast 
Low on the turf shall rest, 
Ere the dark hunters the herd have 
passed by. 

Snow-girdled crags where the hoarse 
wind is raving, 
Rocks where the weary floods mur- 
mur and wail, 
Wilds where the fern by the furrow 
is waving, 
Reeled with the echoes that rode on 
the gale; 
Far as the tempest thrills 
Over the darkened hills, 
Far as the sunshine streams over the 
plain, 



43 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 



Roused by the tyrant band, 
Woke all the mighty land, 
Girded for battle from mountain to 



Green be the graves where her mar- 
tyrs are lying ! 
Shroudless and tombless they sunk 
to their rest, — 

While o'er their ashes the starry fold 
flying 



Wraps the proud eagle they roused 
from his nest. 
Borne on her Northern pine, 
Long o'er the foaming brine 
Spread her broad banner to storm and 
to sun ; 
Heaven keep her ever free, 
Wide as o'er land and sea 
Floats the fair emblem her heroes 
have won! 





^^*^^^>^r- 



44 



HOLMES. 



UNION AND LIBERTY. 



Flag of the heroes who left us their 

glory, 
Borne through their battle-fields' 

thunder and flame, 
Blazoned in song and illumined in 
story, 
Wave o'er us all who inherit their 
fame ! 
Up with our banner bright, 
Sprinkled with starry light, 
Spread its fair emblems from moun- 
tain to shore, 
While through the sounding sky 
Loud rings the Nation's cry, — 
Union and Liberty ! One ever- 
more ! 

Light of our firmament, guide of our 
Nation, 
Pride of her children, and honored 
afar, 
Let the wide beams of thy full con- 
stellation 
Scatter each cloud that would 
darken a star! 
Up with our banner bright, etc. 

Empire unsceptred ! what foe shall as- 
sail thee, 
Bearing the standard of Liberty's 
van? 



Think not the God of thy fathers shall 

fail thee, 
Striving with men for the birthright 
of man ! 
Up with our banner bright, etc. 

Yet if, by madness and treachery 
blighted, 
Dawns the dark hour when the 
sword thou must draw, 
Then with the arms of thy million? 

united, 
Smite the bold traitors to Freedom 
and Law ! 
Up with our banner bright, etc. 

Lord of the Universe ! shield us and 
guide us, 
Trusting thee always, through shad- 
ow and sun ! 
Thou hast united us, who shall divide 
us? 
Keep us, O keep us the Many in 
One? 
Up with our banner bright, 
Sprinkled with starry light, 
Spread its fair emblems from moun- 
tain to shore, 
While through the sounding sky 
Loud rings the Nation's cry, — 
Union and Liberty! One ever- 
more! 




45 



HOLMES. 



GENIUS. 

If you have the consciousness of genius, do something to show it. The world 
is pretty quick, nowadays, to catch the flavor of true originality ; if you write 
anything remarkable, the magazines and newspapers will find you out, as the 
school-boys find out where the ripe apples and pears are. Produce anything 
really good, and an intelligent editor will jump at it. Don't flatter yourself 
that any article of yours is rejected because you are unknown to fame. Noth- 
ing pleases an editor more than to get anything worth having from a new 
hand. There is always a dearth of really fine articles for a first-rate journal ; 
for, of a hundred pieces received, ninety are at or below the sea-level ; some 
have water enough, but no head ; some head enough, but no water ; only two 01 
three are from full reservoirs, high up that hill which is so hard to climb. 

You may have genius. The contrary is of course probable, but it is not 
demonstrated. If you have, the world wants you more than you want it. II 
has not only a desire, but a passion, for every spark of genius that shows it- 
self among us ; there is not a bull-calf in our national pasture that can bleat at 
rhyme but it is ten to one, among his friends, and no takers, that he is the 
real, genuine, no-mistake Osiris. 

From The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 



How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the law 
that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong, to get as low 
as the earth will let it ! That is genius. But what is this transient upward 
movement, whieh gives us the glitter and the rainbow, to that unsleeping, all- 
present force of gravity, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever (if the uni- 
verse be eternal), — the great outspread hand of God himself, forcing a] 1 
things down into their places, and keeping them there? Such, in smaller 
proportion, is the force of character to the fitful movements of genius, as they 
are or have been linked to each other in many a household, where one name 
was historic, and the other, let me say the nobler, unknown, save by some 
faint reflected ray, borrowed from its lustrous companion. 

From The Professor at the Breakfast Table. 



A man of genius, or any kind of superiority, is not debarred from admiring 
the same quality in another, nor the other from returning his admiration. 
From The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 



47 



HOLMES. 






m 



7: • 




GRANDMOTHER'S STORY OF BUNKER-HILL BATTLE. 

AS SHE SAW IT FROM THE BELFUY. 

'Tis like stirring living embers when, at eighty, one remembers 

All the achings and the quakings of " the times that tried men's souls ;" 

When I talk of Whig and Tory, when I tell the Rebel story, 

To you the words are ashes, but to me they 're burning coals. 

I had heard the muskets' rattle of the April running battle ; 
Lord Percy's hunted soldiers, I can see their red coats still ; 
But a deadly chill comes o'er me, as the day looms up before me, 
When a thousand men lay bleeding on the slopes of Bunker's Hill. 

'T was a peaceful summer's morning, when the first thing gave us warning 
Was the booming of the cannon from the river and the shore : 
" Child," says grandma, "what 's the matter, what is all this noise and clatter? 
Have those scalping Indian devils come to murder us once more V " 

Poor old soul! my sides were shaking in the midst of all my quaking, 
To hear her talk of Indians when the guns began to roar : 
She had seen the burning village, and the slaughter and the pillage, 
When the Mohawks killed her father with their bullets through his door. 

Then I said, " Now, dear old granny, don't you fret and worry any, 
For I Ml soon come back and tell you whether this is work or play; 
There can't be mischief in it, so I won't be gone a minute " — 
For a minute then I started. I was gone the livelong day. 

No time for bodice-lacing or for looking-glass grimacing • 
Down my hair went as I hurried, tumbling half-way to my heels ; 
God forbid your ever knowing, when there 's blood around her flowing, 
How the lonely, helpless daughter of a quiet household feels ! 

49 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 

In the street I heard a thumping; and I knew it was the stumping 
Of the Corporal, our old neighbor, on that wooden leg he wore, 
With a knot of women round him, — it was lucky I had found him, 
So I followed with the others, and the Corporal marched before. 

They were making for the steeple, — the old soldier and his people; 
The pigeons circled round us as we climbed the creaking stair, 
Just across the narrow river — O, so close it made me shiver ! — 
Stood a fortress on the hill-top that but yesterday was bare. 

Not slow our eyes to find it ; well we knew who stood behind it, 

Though the earthwork hid them from us, and the stubborn walls were dumb : 

Here were sister, wife, and mother, looking wild upon each other, 

And their lips were white with terror as they said, The hour has come ! 

The morning slowly wasted, not a morsel had we tasted, 
And our heads were almost splitting with the cannons' deafening thrill, 
When a figure tall and stately round the rampart strode sedately; 
It was Prescott, one since told me; he commanded on the hill. 

Every woman's heart grew bigger when we saw his manly figure, 
With the banyan buckled round it, standing up so straight and tall ; 
Like a gentleman of leisure who is strolling out for pleasure, 
Through the storm of shells and cannon-shot he walked around the wall. 

At eleven the streets were swarming, for the red-coats' ranks were forming; 
At noon in marching order they were moving to the piers ; 
How the bayonets gleamed and glistened, as we looked far down, and listened 
To the trampling and the drum-beat of the belted grenadiers ! 

At length the men have started, with a cheer (it seemed faint-hearted), 
In their scarlet regimentals, with their knapsacks on their backs, 
And the reddening, rippling water, as after a sea-fight's slaughter, 
Round the barges gliding onward blushed like blood along their tracks. 

So they crossed to the other border, and again they formed in order; 
And the boats came back for soldiers, came for soldiers, soldiers still : 
The time seemed everlasting to us women faint and fasting, — 
At last they 're moving, marching, marching proudly up the hill. 

We can see the bright steel glancing all along the lines advancing — 
Now the front rank fires a volley — they have thrown away their shot ; 
For behind their earthwork lying, all the balls above them flying, 
Our people need not hurry; so they wait and answer not. 

Then the Corporal, our old cripple (he would swear sometimes and tipple), — 
He had heard the bullets whistle (in the old French war) before, — 
Calls out in words of jeering, just as if they all were hearing, — 
And his wooden leg thumps fiercely on the dusty belfry floor : — 

11 O! fire away, ye villains, and earn King George's shillin's, 
But ye '11 waste a ton of powder afore a ' rebel ' falls ; 

50 



HOLMES. 

You may bang the dirt and welcome, they 're as safe as Dan'l Malcolm 
Ten foot beneath the gravestone that you've splintered with your balls! " 

In the hush of expectation, in the awe and trepidation 
Of the dread approaching moment, we are wellnigh breathless all ; 
Though the rotten bars are failing on the rickety belfry railing, 
We are crowding up against them like the waves against a wall. 

Just a glimpse (the air is clearer,) they are nearer, — nearer, — nearer, 
When a flash — a curling smoke wreath — then a crash — the steeple shakes — 
The deadly truce is ended ; the tempest's shroud is rended ; 
Like a morning mist it gathered, like a thunder-cloud it breaks ! 

O the sight our eyes discover as the blue-black smoke blows over ! 
The red-coats stretched in windrows as a mower rakes his hay; 
Here a scarlet heap is lying, there a headlong crowd is flying 
Like a billow that has broken and is shivered into spray. 

Then we cried, " The troops are routed! they are beat — it can't be doubted! 
God be thanked, the fight is over! " — Ah! the grim old soldier's smile! 
" Tell us, tell us why you look so? " (we could hardly speak, we shook so), — 
11 Are they beaten? Are they beaten? Are they beaten? " — "Wait a while." 

O the trembling and the terror! for too soon we saw our error; 
They are baffled, not defeated ; we have driven them back in vain ; 
And the columns that were scattered, round the colors that were tattered, 
Toward the sullen silent fortress turn their belted breasts again. 

All at once, as we are gazing, lo the roofs of Charlestown blazing ! 

They have fired the harmless village ; in an hour it will be down ! 

The Lord in heaven confound them, rain his fire and brimstone round them, — 

The robbing, murdering red-coats, that would burn a peaceful town ! 

They are marching, stern and solemn ! we can see each massive column 
As they near the naked earth-mound with the slanting walls so steep. 
Have our soldiers got faint-hearted, and in noiseless haste departed? 
Are they panic-struck and helpless? Are they palsied or asleep ? 

Now ! the walls they 're almost under! scarce a rod the foes asunder ! 
Not a firelock flashed against them! up the earthwork they will swarm ! 
But the words have scarce been spoken, when the ominous calm is broken, 
And a bellowing crash has emptied all the vengeance of the storm ! 

So again, with murderous slaughter, pelted backwards to the water, 

Fly Pigot's running heroes and the frightened braves of Howe ; 

And we shout, " At' last they 're done for, it's their barges they have run for: 

They are beaten, beaten, beaten; and the battle 's over now ! " 

And we looked, poor timid creatures, on the rough old soldier's features, 
Our lips afraid to question, but he knew what we would ask : 
" Not sure," he said ; " keep quiet, — once more, I guess, they '11 try it — 
Here 's damnation to the cut-throats ! " — then he handed me his flask, 

51 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 

Saying, " Gal, you 're looking shaky ; have a drop of old Jamaiky; 
I 'm afeard there '11 be more trouble afore the job is done ; " 
So I took one scorching swallow ; dreadful faint I felt and hollow, 
Standing there from early morning when the firing was begun. 

All through those hours of trial I had watched a calm clock dial, 

As the hands kept creeping, creeping, — they were creeping round to four, 

When the old man said, "They're forming with their bagonets fixed for 

storming : 
It 's the death-grip that 's a coming, — they will try the works once more." 

With brazen trumpets blaring, the flames behind them glaring, 
The deadly wall before them, in close array they come ; 
Still onward, upward toiling, like a dragon's fold uncoiling, — 
Like the rattlesnake's shrill warning the reverberating drum ! 

Over heaps all torn and gory — shall I tell the fearful story, 

How they surged above the breast-work, as a sea breaks over a deck; 

How, driven, yet scarce defeated, our worn-out men retreated, 

With their powder-horns all emptied, like the swimmers from a wreck? 

It has all been told and painted ; as for me, they say I fainted, 
And the wooden-legged old Corporal stumped with me down the stair : 
When I woke from dreams affrighted the evening lamps were lighted, — 
On the floor a youth was lying; his bleeding breast was bare. 

And I heard through all the flurry, " Send for Warren ! hurry! hurry! 
jL.ell him here 's a soldier bleeding, and he '11 come and dress his wound ! " 
Ah, we knew not till the morrow told its tale of death and sorrow, 
How the starlight found him stiffened on the dark and bloody ground. 

Who the youth was, -what his name was, where the place from which he came 

was, 
Who had brought him from the battle and had left him at our door, 
He could not speak to tell us ; but 'twas one of our brave fellows, 
As the homespun plainly showed us which the dying soldier wore. 

For they all thought he was dying, as they gathered round him crying, — 
And they said, " O, how they '11 miss him !" and, " What will his mother 

do"?" 
Then, his eyelids just unclosing like a child's that has been dozing, 
He faintly murmured, "Mother ! " and — I saw his eyes were blue. 

— " Why, grandma, how you 're winking ! " — Ah, my child, it sets me thinking 
Of a story not like this one. Well, he somehow lived along ; 

So we came to know each other, and I nursed him like a — mother, 
Till at last he stood before me, tall, and rosy-cheeked, and strong. 

And we sometimes walked together in the pleasant summer weather ; 

— " Please to tell us what his name was? " — Just your own, my little dear, — 
There 's his picture Copley painted : we became so well acquainted, 

That — in short, that 's why I 'm grandma, and you children all are here ! 

52 



HOLMES. 



INTELLECTS. 

One-STORY intellects, two-story intellects, three-story intellects with sky- 
lights. All fact- collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are one-story 
men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the labors of the 
fact-collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, pre- 
dict; their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight. There 
are minds with large ground-floors, that can store an infinite amount of knowl- 
edge; some librarians, for instance, who know enough of books to help other 
people, without being able to make much other use of their knowledge, have 
intellects of this class. Your great working lawyer has two spacious stories ; 
his mind is clear, because his mental floors are large, and he has room to ar- 
range his thoughts so that he can get at them, — facts below, principles above, 
and all in ordered series ; poets are often narrow below, incapable of clear 
statement, and with small power of consecutive reasoning, but full of light, if 
sometimes rather bare of furniture, in the attics. 

From The Poet at the Breakfast Table. 



The dreaming faculties are always the dangerous ones, because their mode 
of action can be imitated by artificial excitement; the reasoning ones are safe, 
because they imply continued voluntary effort. 

From The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 



I rather think life can coin thought somewhat faster than I can count it off 
in words. What if one shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the 
dew that falls of a June evening on the leaves of his garden? Shall there be 
no more dew on those leaves thereafter? Marry, yea, — many drops large 
and round and full of moonlight as those thou shalt have absterged! 

From The Professor at the Breakfast Table. 



The wider the intellect, the larger and simpler the expressions in which its 
knowledge is embodied. 

From The Professor at the Breakfast Table. 

53 



HOLMES. 
TO H. W. LONGFELLOW. 

BEFORE HIS DEPARTURE FOR EUROPE, MAY 27, 1868. 

Our Poet, who has taught the Western breeze 
To waft his songs before him o'er the seas, 
Will find them wheresoe'r his wanderings reach 
Borne on the spreading tide of English speech 
Twin with the rhythmic waves that kiss the farthest beach. 

Where shall the singing bird a stranger be 
That finds a nest for him in every tree? 
How shall he travel who can never go 
Where his own voice the echoes do not know, 
Where his own garden flowers no longer learn to grow ? 

Ah, gentlest soul! how gracious, how benign 
Breathes through our troubled life that voice of thine, 
Filled with a sweetness born of happier spheres, 
That wins and warms, that kindles, softens, cheers, 
That calms the wildest woe and stays the bitterest tears ! 

Forgive the simple words that sound like praise ; 
The mist before me dims my gilded phrase ; 
Our speech at best is half alive and cold, 
And save that tenderer moments make us bold 
Our whitening lips would close, their truest truth untold. 

We who behold our autumn sun below 
The Scorpion's sign, against the Archer's bow, 
Know well what parting means of friend from friend; 
After the snows no freshening dews descend, 
And what the frost has marred, the sunshine will not mend. 

So we all count the months, the weeks, the days, 
That keep thee from us in unwonted ways, 
Grudging to alien hearths our widowed time ; 
And one has shaped a breath in artless rhyme 
That sighs, " We track thee still through each remotest clime." 

What wishes, longings, blessings, prayers shall be 
The more than golden freight that floats with thee! 
And know, whatever welcome thou shalt find, — 
Thou who hast won the hearts of half mankind, — 
The proudest, fondest love thou leavest still behind! 
55 



HOLMES. 




THE FLOWER OF LIBERTY. 



What flower is this that greets the 

morn, 
Its hues from Heaven so freshly born? 
With burning star and flaming band 
It kindles all the sunset land : 
O tell us what its name may be, — 
Is this the Flower of Liberty? 
It is the banner of the free, 
The starry Flower of Liberty ! 

In savage Nature's far abode 

Its tender seed our fathers sowed ; 

The storm- winds rocked its swelling 

bud, 
Its opening leaves were streaked with 

blood, 
Till lo! earth's tyrants shook to see 
The full blown Flower of Liberty! 
Then hail the banner of the free, 
The starry Flower of Liberty ! 

Behold its streaming rays unite, 
One mingling flood of braided light, — 
The red that fires the Southern rose, 
With spotless white from Northern 
snows, 



And, spangled o'er its azure, see 

The sister Stars of Liberty! 

Then hail the banner of the free, 
The starry Flower of Liberty ! 

The blades of heroes fence it round, 
Where'er it springs is holy ground; 
From tower and dome its glories 

spread ; 
It waves where lonely sentries tread; 
It makes the land as ocean free, 
And plants an empire on the sea! 
Then hail the banner of the free, 
The starry Flower of Liberty ! 

Thy sacred leaves, fair Freedom's 

flower, 
Shall ever float on dome and tower, 
To all their heavenly colors true, 
In blaekening frost or crimson 

dew, — 
And God love us as we love thee, 
Thrice holy Flower of Liberty ! 
Then hail the banner of the free, 
The starry Flower of Liberty! 



57 



HOLMES. 



ARMY HYMN. 

"Old Hundred." 

Lord of Hosts! Almighty King ! 
Behold the sacrifice we bring ! 
To every arm Thy strength impart, 
Thy spirit shed through every heart ! 

Wake in our breasts the living fires, 
The holy faith that warmed our sires ; 
Thy hand hath made our Nation free ; 
To die for her is serving Thee. 

Be Thou a pillared flame to show 
The midnight snare, the silent foe ; 
And when the battle thunders loud, 
Still guide us in its moving cloud. 

God of all Nations! Sovereign Lord! 
In Thy dread name we draw the sword, 
We lift the starry flag on high 
That fills with light our stormy sky. 

From treason's rent, from murder's stain, 
Guard Thou its folds till Peace shall reign. 
Till fort and field, till shore and sea, 
Join our loud anthem, Praise to Thee ! 




&*.> 



£* 






■,■■■'.'■' ' i " , ,: ' 



69 



HOLMES. 

SPECIALISTS. 

he said — I am hospitable enough in my feelings to him and all 
his tribe. These specialists are the coral-insects that build up a reef. By 
and by it will be an island, and for aught we know may grow into a continent. 
But I don't want to be a coral-insect myself. I had rather be a voyager that 
visits all the reefs and islands the creatures build, and sails over the seas 
where they have as yet built up nothing. I am a little afraid that science is 
breeding us down too fast into coral-insects. A man like Newton or Leibnitz 
or Haller used to paint a picture of outward or inward nature with a free hand, 
and stand back and look at it as a whole and feel like an archangel ; but now- 
adays you have a Society, and they come together and make a great mosaic, 
each man bringing his little bit and sticking it in its place, but so taken up 
with his petty fragment that he never thinks of looking at the picture the 
little bits make when they are put together. You can't get any talk out oi 
these specialists away from their own subjects, any more than you can ge< 
help from a policeman outside of his own beat. 

— Yes, — said 1, — but why shouldn't we always set a man talking abcrr 
the thing he knows best? 

— No doubt, no doubt, if you meet him once ; but what are you going to Ct, 
with him if you meet him every day? I travel with a man and we wani to 
make change very often in paying bills. But every time I ask him to change 
a pistareen, or give me two fo'pencchappenies for a ninepence, or help me to 
make out two and thrippence (mark the old Master's archaisms about the 
currency), what does the fellow do but put his hand in his pocket and pull 
out an old Roman coin ; I have no change, says he, but this assarion of Dio- 
cletian. Mighty deal of good that '11 do me ! 

— It is n't quite so handy as a few specimens of the modern currency would 
be, but you can pump him on numismatics. 

— To be sure, to be sure. I 've pumped a thousand men of all they could 
teach me, or at least all I could learn from 'em ; and if it comes to that, I 
never saw the man that could n't teach me something. I can get along with 
everybody in his place, though I think the place of some of my friends is over 
there among the feeble-minded pupils, and I don't believe there 's one of 
them 1 could 'nt go to school to for half an hour and be the wiser for it. But 
people you talk with every day have got to have feeders for their minds, as 
much as the stream that turns a mill-wheel has. It is n't one little rill that 's 
going to keep the floatboards turning round. Take a dozen of the brightest 
men you can find in the brightest city, wherever that may be, — perhaps you 
and I think we know, — and let'em come together once a month, and you '11 
find out in the course of a year or two the ones that have feeders from all the 
hillsides. Your common talkers, that exchange the gossip of the day, have no 
wheel in particular to turn, and the wash of the rain as it runs down the 
street is enough for them. 

— Do you mean you can always see the sources from which a man fills his 
mind, — his feeders, as you call them ? 

— I don't go quite so far as that, — the Master said. — I've seen men 
whose minds were always overflowing, and yet they did n't read much nor go 

61 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 

much into the world. Sometimes you'll find a bit of a pond-hole in a pasture, 
and you '11 plunge your walking-stick into it and think you are going to touch 
bottom. But you find you are mistaken. Some of these little stagnant pond- 
holes are a good deal deeper than you think ; you may tie a stone to a bed- 
cord and not get soundings in some of 'em. The country boys will tell you 
they have no bottom, but that only means that they are mighty deep ; and so 
a good many stagnant, stupid-seeming people are a great deal deeper than the 
length of your intellectual walking-stick, I can tell you. There are hidden 
springs that keep the little pond- holes full when the mountain brooks are all 
dried up. You poets ought to know that. 

— I can't help thinking you are more tolerant towards the specialists than 
I thought at first, by the way you seemed to look at our dried-up neighbor 
and his small pursuits. 

— I don't like the word tolerant, — the Master said. — As long as the Lord 
can tolerate me I think I can stand my fellow-creatures. Philosophically I love 
'em all ; empirically, I don't think I am very fond of all of 'em. It depends on 
how you look at a man or a woman. Come here, Youngster, will you? — he 
said to That Boy. 

The Boy was trying to catch a blue-bottle to add to his collection, and was 
indisposed to give up the chase ; but he presently saw that the Master had 
taken out a small coin and laid it on the table, and felt himself drawn in that 
direction. 

— Read that, — said the Master. 

— U-n-i-ni — United States of America 5 cents. 
The Master turned the coin over. — Now read that. 

— In God is our t-r-u-s-t — trust. 1869. 

— Is that the same piece of money as the other one ? 

— There ain't any other one, — said the Boy, — there ain't but one, but 
it 's got two sides to it with different reading. 

— That's it, that's it, — said the Master, — two sides to everybody, as 
there are to that piece of money. I 've seen an old woman that would n't 
fetch five cents if you should put her up for sale at public auction ; and yet 
come to read the other side of her, she had a trust in God Almighty that was 
like the bow anchor of a three-decker. It 's faith in something and enthu- 
siasm for something that makes a life worth looking at. I don't think your 
ant-eating specialist, with his sharp nose and pin-head eyes, is the best every- 
day companion ; but any man who knows one thing well is worth listening to 
for once ; and if you are of the large-brained variety of the race, and want to 
fill out your programme of the order of things in a systematic and exhaustive 
way, and get all the half-notes and flats and sharps of humanity into your scale, 
you 'd a great deal better shut your front door and open your two side ones 
when you come across a fellow that has made a real business of doing any- 
thing. 

That Boy stood all this time looking hard at the five-cent piece. 

— Take it, — said the Master, with a good-natured smile. 

The Boy made a snatch at it and was off for the purpose of investing it. 
From The Poet at the Breakfast Table. 
62 



HOLMES. 



THE BOYS. 



Has there any old fellow got mixed 
with the boys? 

If there has, take him out, without 
making a noise. 

Hang the Almanac's cheat and the 
Catalogue's spite! 

Old time is a liar! We 're twenty to- 
night ! 

We 're twenty ! We 're twenty ! Who 

says we are more? 
He 's tipsy, — young jackanapes ! — 

show him the door! 
" Gray temples at twenty? " — Yes! 

ichite if we please; 
Where the snow-flakes fall thickest 

there 's nothing can freeze! 

Was it snowing I spoke of ? Excuse 

the mistake! 
Look close, — you will see not a sign 

of a flake ! 
We want some new garlands for those 

we have shed, — 
And these are white roses in place of 

the red. 

We 've a trick, we young fellows, you 

may have been told, 
Of talking (in public) as if we were 

old : — 
That boy we call " Doctor," and this 

we call " Judge ; " 
It's a neat little fiction, — of course 

it 's all fudge. 

That fellow 's the " Speaker," — the 

one on the right ; 
" Mr. Mayor," my young one, how 

are you to-night ? 



That's our " Member of Congress,' 1 
we say when we chaff; 

That 's the i4 Reverend " What 's his 
name? — don't make me laugh. 

That boy with the grave mathemati- 
cal look 

Made believe he had written a won- 
derful book, 

And the Royal Society thought it 
was true ! 

So they chose him right in ; a good 
joke it was, too! 

There 's a boy, we pretend, with a 

three-decker brain, 
That could harness a team with a 

logical chain ; 
When he spoke for our manhood in 

syllabled fire, 
We called him "The Justice," but 

now he 's " The Squire." 

And there 's a nice youngster of ex- 
cellent pith, — 

Fate tried to conceal him by naming 
him Smith ; 

But he shouted a song for the brave 
and the free, — 

Just read on his medal, " My coun- 
try," "of thee! " 

You hear that boy laughing? — You 

think he 's all fun ; 
But the angels laugh, too, at the good 

he has done ; 
The children laugh loud as they troop 

to his call, 
And the poor man that knows him 

laughs loudest of all! 



63 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 



Yes, we 're boys, — always playing 
with tongue or with pen, — 

And I sometimes have asked, — Shall 
we ever be men? 

Shall we always be youthful, and 
laughing, and gay, 

Till the last dear companion drops 
smiling away? 



Then here 's to our boyhood, its gold 
and its gray! 

The stars of its winter, the dews of 
its May ! 

And when we have done with our life- 
lasting toys, 

Dear Father, take care of thy chil- 
dren, the Boys? 






64 




UNDER THE WASHINGTON ELM, CAMBRIDGE. 
April 27, 1861. 



2ighty years have passed, and 

more, 
Since under the brave old tree 
Our fathers gathered in arms, and 

swore 
They would follow the sign their ban- 
ners bore, 
And fight till the land was free. 

Half of their work was done, 

Half is left to do, — 
Cambridge, and Concord, and Lexing- 
ton! 
When the battle is fought and won, 

What shall be told of you ? 

Hark! — 't is the south - wind 

moans, — 
Who are the martyrs down ? 



Ah, the marrow was true in your chil- 
dren's bones 
That sprinkled with blood the cursed 
stones 
Of the murder-haunted town! 

What if the storm-clouds blow ? 

What if the green leaves fall? 
Better the crashing tempest's throe 
Than the army of worms that gnawed 
below; 

Trample them one and all! 

Then, when the battle is won, 
And the land from traitors free, 

Our children shall tell of the strife 
begun 

When Liberty's second April sun 
Was bright on our brave old tree! 



65 



HOLMES. 




THE ALLEGORY OF OLD AGE. 

Old Age, this is Mr. Professor ; Mr. Professor, this is Old Age. 

Old Age. — Mr. Professor, I hope to see you well. I have known you for 
some time, though I think you did not know me. Shall we walk down the 
street together? 

Professor (drawing back a little). — We can talk more quietly, perhaps, in 
my study. Will you tell me how it is you seem to be acquainted with every- 
body you are introduced to, though he evidently considers you an entire 
stranger? 

Old Age. — I make it a rule never to force myself upon a person's recogni- 
tion until I have known him at least Jive years. 

Professor. — Do you mean to say that you have known me so long as that? 

Old Age. — I do. I left my card on you longer ago than that, but I am 
afraid you never read it ; yet I see you have it with you. 

Professor. — Where ? 

Old Age. — There, between your eyebrows, — three straight lines running 
up and down; all the probate courts know that token, — "Old Age, his 
mark." Put your forefinger on the inner end of one eyebrow, and your mid- 
dle finger on the inner end of the other eyebrow; now separate the fingers, 
and you will smooth out my sign- manual ; that 's the way you used to look 
before I left my card on you. 

Professor. — What message do people generally send back when you first 
call on them ? 

Old Age. — Not at home. Then I leave a card and go. Next year I call; 
get the same answer; leave another card. So for five or six, — sometimes 
ten years or more. At last, if they don't let me in, I break in through the 
front door or the windows. 

We talked together in this way some time. Then Old Age said again, — 
Come, let us walk down the street together, and offered me a cane, an eye-glass, 
a tippet, and a pair of over-shoes. — No, much obliged to you, said I. I don't 
want those things, and I had a little rather talk with you here, privately, in my 
study. So I dressed myself up in a jaunty way and walked out alone; — got a 
fall, caught a cold, was laid up with a lumbago, and had time to think over 
this whole matter. — From The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 

67 



HOLMES. 




THE PROMISE. 



Not charity we ask, 
Nor yet thy gift refuse ; 
Please thy light fancy with the easy 
task 
Only to look and choose. 

The little-heeded toy 
That wins thy treasured gold 
May be the dearest memory, holiest 

Of coming years untold. 

Heaven rains on every heart, 
But there its showers divide, 
The drops of mercy choosing as they 
part 
The dark or glowing side. 

One kindly deed may turn 
The fountain of thy soul 



To love's sweet day-star, that shall 
o'er thee burn 
Long as its currents roll ! 

The pleasures thou hast planned, — 
Where shall their memory be 
When the white angel with the freez- 
ing hand 
Shall sit and watch by thee V 

Living, thou dost not live, 
If mercy's spring run dry ; 
What Heaven has lent thee wilt thou 
freely give, 
Dying, thou shalt not die ! 

He promised even so! 
To thee His lips repeat, — 
Behold, the tears that soothed thy 
sister's woe 
Have washed thy Master's feet I 




68 



HOLMES. 





The Old South Church 



From which sallied forth the Patriots, disguised as Indians, who threw the tea overboard in Boston 
Harbor, December 16, IV 73. 

A BALLAD OF THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY. 



No ! never such a draught was poured 

Since Hebe served with nectar 
The bright Olympians and their 
Lord, 

Her over-kind protector, — 
Since Father Noah squeezed the 
grape 

And took to such behaving 
As would have shamed our grandsire 
I ape 

Before the days of shaving, — 
No! ne'er was mingled such a draught 

In palace, hall, or arbor, 
As freemen brewed and tyrants 
quaffed 

That night in Boston Harbor ! 
It kept King George so long awake 

His brain at last got addled, 



It made the nerves of Britain shake 
With sevenscore millions saddled ; 
Before that bitter cup was drained, 

Amid the roar of cannon, 
The Western war-cloud's crimson 
stained 
The Thames, the Clyde, the Shan- 
non; 
Full many a six-foot grenadier 

The flattened grass had measured, 
And many a mother many a year 

Her tearful memories treasured ; 
Fast spread the tempest's darkening 
pall 
The mighty realms were troubled, 
The storm broke loose, but first of 
all 
The Boston teapot bubbled! 



71 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 



An evening party, — only that, 

No formal invitation, 
No gold-laced coat, no stiff cravat, 

No feast in contemplation, 
No silk-robed dames, no fiddling band, 
No flowers, no songs, no dancing, — 
A tribe of Red men, axe in hand, — 

Behold the guests advancing! 
How fast the stragglers join the 
throng, 
From stall and workshop gathered ! 
The lively barber skips along 

And leaves a chin half-lathered ; 
The smith has flung his hammer 
down, — 
The horseshoe still is glowing ; 
The truant tapster at the Crown 
Has left a beer-cask flowing ; 
The cooper's boys have dropped the 
adze, 
And trot behind their master ; 
Up run the tarry ship-yard lads, — 
The crowd is hurrying faster, — 
Out from the Millpond's purlieus gush 
The streams of white-faced millers, 
And down their slippery alleys rush 

The lusty young Fort-Hillers ; 
The rope walk lends its 'prentice 
crew, — 
The tories seize the omen : 
" Ay, boys, you '11 soon have work 
to do 
For England's rebel foemen, 
'King Hancock,' Adams, and their 
gang, 
That fire the mob with treason, — 
When these we shoot and those we 
hang 
The town will come to reason." 

On — on to where the tea-ships ride! 

And now their ranks are form- 
ing, — 
A rush, and up the Dartmouth's side 

The Mohawk band is swarming ! 
See the fierce natives! What a glimpse 

Of paint and fur and feather, 



As all at once the full-grown imps 
Light on the deck together! 

A scarf the pigtail's secret keeps, 
A blanket hides the breeches, — 

And out the cursed cargo leaps, 
And overboard it pitches! 

O woman, at the evening board 

So gracious, sweet, and purring, 
So happy while the tea is poured, 

So blest while spoons are stirring, 
What martyr can compare with thee, 

The mother, wife, or daughter, 
That night, instead of best Bohea, 

Condemned to milk and water! 

Ah, little dreams the quiet dame 

Who plies with rock and spindle 
The patient flax, how great a flame 

Yon little spark shall kindle ! 
The lurid morning shall reveal 

A fire no king can smother 
Where British flint and Boston steel 

Have clashed against each other ! 
Old charters shrivel in its track, 

His Worship's bench has crumbled, 
It climbs and clasps the union-jack, 

Its blazoned pomp is humbled, 
The flags go down on land and sea 

Like corn before the reapers ; 
So burned the fire that brewed the tea 

That Boston served her keepers ! 

The waves that wrought a century's 
wreck 

Have rolled o'er Whig and Tory; 
The Mohawks on the Dartmouth's 
deck 

Still live in song and story; 
The waters in the rebel bay 

Have kept the tea-leaf savor; 
Our old North-Enders in their spray 

Still taste a Hyson flavor; 
And Freedom's teacup still o'erflows 

With ever fresh libations, 
To cheat of slumber all her foes 

And cheer the wakening nations! 



72 



HOLMES. 



SPRING HAS COME. 



INTRA MUROS. 



The sunbeams, lost for half a year, 
Slant through my pane their morn- 
ing rays; 

For dry northwesters cold and clear, 
The east blows in its thin blue haze. 

And first the snowdrop's bells are seen, 
Then close against the sheltering 
wall 

The tulip's horn of dusky green, 
The peony's dark unfolding ball. 

The golden-chaliced crocus burns; 

The long narcissus-blades appear ; 
The cone-beaked hyacinth returns 

To light her blue-flamed chande- 
lier. 

The willow's whistling lashes, wrung 
By the wild winds of gusty March, 

With sallow leaflets lightly strung, 
Are swaying by the tufted larch. 

The elms have robed their slender 
spray 
With full-blown flower and embryo 
leaf; 
Wide o'er the clasping arch of day 
Soars like a cloud their hoary chief. 

See the proud tulip's flaunting cup, 
That flames in glory for an hour, — 

Behold it withering, — then look up, — 
How meek the forest monarch's 
flower ! 

When wake the violets, Winter dies; 
When sprout the elm-buds, Spring is 

near ; 
When lilacs blossom, Summer cries, 
" Bud, little roses! Spring is here 1 " 



73 



The windows blush with fresh bou- 
quets, 

Cut with the May-dew on their lips; 
The radish all its bloom displays, 

Pink as Aurora's finger-tips. 

Nor less the flood of light that showers 
On beauty's changed corolla- 
shades, — 

The walks are gay as bridal bowers 
With rows of many-petalled maids. 

The scarlet shell-fish click and clash 

In the blue barrow where they slide; 
The horseman, proud of streak and 

splash, 
Creeps homeward from his moraine 

ride. 

Here comes the dealer's awkward 
string, 
With neck in rope and tail in knot, — 
Rough colts, with careless country- 
swing, 
In lazy walk or slouching trot. 

Wild filly from the mountain-side, 
Doomed to the close and chafing 
thills, 

Lend me thy long, untiring stride 
To seek with thee thy western hills! 

I hear the whispering voice of Spring, 

The thrush's trill, the robin's cry, 
Like some poor bird with prisoned wine 
That sits and sings, but longs to fly. 

O for one spot of living green, — 
One little spot where leaves can 
grow, — 

To love unblamed, to walk unseen, 
To dream above, to sleep below ! 



HOL. 






E 






- 

— 

\ Zoyder-Z 

I 

! 



! 

: — 

'.' . . . ■ . 

- 

! ' 

- 

— 

=: battle- 

-. . ■ 

■ 



': 



HOLMES. 



THE COMET. 



The Comet! He is on his way, 

And singing as he flies ; 
The whizzing planets shrink before 

The spectre of the skies; 
Ah ! well may regal orbs burn blue, 

And satellites turn pale, 
Ten million cubic miles of head, 

Ten billion leagues of tail ! 

On, on by whistling spheres of light 

He flashes and he flames; 
He turns not to the left nor right, 

He asks them not their names; 
One spurn from his demoniac heel, — 

Away, away they fly, 
Where darkness might be bottled up 

And sold for " Tyrian dye." 

And what would happen to the land, 

And how would look the sea, 
If in the bearded devil's path 

Our earth should chance to be ? 
i'ull hot and high the sea would boil, 

Full red the forests gleam ; 
Methought I saw and heard it all 

In a dyspeptic dream ! 

I saw a tutor take his tube 

The Comet's course to spy; 
I heard a scream, — the gathered rays 

Had stewed the tutor's eye; 
I saw a fort, — the soldiers all 

Were armed with goggles green; 
Pop cracked the guns! whiz flew the 
balls! 

Bans: went the magazine! 

I saw a poet dip a scroll 

Each moment in a tub, 
I read upon the warping back 

" The Dream of Beelzebub; " 
He could not see his verses burn, 

Although his brain was fried, 



And ever and anon he bent 
To wet them as they dried. 

I saw the scalding pitch roll down 

The crackling, sweating pines, 
And streams of smoke, like water- 
spouts, 

Burst through the rumbling mines ; 
I asked the firemen why they made 

Such noise about the town ; 
They answered not, — but all the 
while 

The brakes went up and down. 

I saw a roasting pullet sit 

Upon a baking egg; 
I saw a cripple scorch his hand 

Extinguishing his leg; 
I saw nine geese upon the wing 

Towards the frozen pole, 
And every mother's gosling fell 

Crisped to a crackling coal. 

I saw the ox that browsed the grass 

Writhe in the blistering rays, 
The herbage in his shrinking jaws 

Was all a fiery blaze ; 
I saw huge fishes, boiled to rags, 

Bob through the bubbling brine; 
And thoughts of supper crossed my 
soul ; 

I had been rash at mine. 

Strange sights ! strange sounds ! O 
fearful dream ! 

Its memory haunts me still, 
The steaming sea, the crimson glare 

That wreathed each wooded hill ; 
Stranger! if through thy reeling brain 

Such midnight visions sweep, 
Spare, spare, O, spare thine evening 
meal, 

And sweet shall be thy sleep! 



77 



HOLMES. 




. 



m 




life -^- 



TREES. 

There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if well 
marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language. Take the oak, 
for instance, and we find it always standing as a type of strength and endu- 
rance. I wonder if you ever thought of the single mark of supremacy which 
distinguishes this tree from all our other forest-trees? All the rest of them 
shirk the work of resisting gravity; the oak alone defies it. It chooses the 
horizontal direction for its limbs, so that their whole weight may tell, — and 
then stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that the strain may be mighty 
enough to be worth resisting. You will find that, in passing from the extreme 
downward droop of the branches of the weeping-willow to the extreme up- 
ward inclination of those of the poplar, they sweep nearly half a circle. At 
90° the oak stops short; to slant upward another degree would mark infirmity 
of purpose; to bend downwards, weakness of organization. The American 
elm betrays something of both ; yet sometimes, as we shall see, puts on a cer- 
tain resemblance to its sturdier neighbor. — From The Autocrat of the 
Breakfast Table. 

70 



HOLMES. 



SS> 




THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE : OR THE WONDERFUL 
" ONE-HOSS SHAY." 

A LOGICAL STORY. 



Have you heard of the wonderful 

one-hoss shay, 
That was built in such a logical way 
It ran a hundred years to a day, 
And then, of a sudden, it ah, but 

stay, 
I '11 tell you what happened without 

delay, 



Scaring the parson into fit-s, 
Frightening people out of their wits, — 
Have you ever heard of that, I say ? 

Seventeen hundred and fifty-five. 
Georgius Secundus was then alive, — 
Snuffy old drone from the German 
hive. 



81 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 



That was the year when Lisbon-town 
Saw the earth open and gulp her 

down, 
And Braddock's army was done so 

brown , 
Left without a scalp to its crown. 
It was on the terrible Earthquake-day 
That the Deacon finished the one- 

hoss shay. 

Now in building of chaises, I tell you 

what, 
There is always somewhere a weakest 

spot, — 
Jn hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill, 
In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill, 
In screw, bolt, thorough brace, — lurk- 
ing still 
Find it somewhere you must and 

will, — 
Above or below, or within or with- 
out, — 
And that 's the reason, beyond a doubt, 
A chaise breaks down, but doesn't 
wear out. 

But the Deacon swore, (as Deacons do, 
With an "I dew vum," or an "I 

tell 2/eow,") 
He would build one shay to beat the 

taown 
r n' the keounty 'n' all the kentry 

raoun'; 
It should be so built that it could n' 

break daown. 
— "Fur," said the Deacon, " 't 's 

mighty plain 
Thut the weakes' place mus' stan the 

strain ; 
V the way t' fix it, uz I maintain, 

Is only jest 
T' make that place uz strong uz the 

rest." 

So the Deacon inquired of the village 

folk 
Where he could find the strongest oak, 



That could n't be split nor bent nor 

broke, — 
That was for spokes and floor and 

sills; 
He sent for lancewood to make the 

thills; 
The crossbars were ash, from the 

straightest trees, 
The panels of white-wood, that cuts 

like cheese, 
But lasts like iron for things like 

these ; 
The hubs of logs from the " Settler's 

ellum," — 
Last of its timber, — they couldn't 

sell 'em, 
Never an axe had seen their chips, 
And the wedges flew from between 

their lips, 
Their blunt ends frizzled like celery- 
tips; 
Step and prop- iron, bolt and screw, 
Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, 
Steel of the finest, bright and blue; 
Thorough brace bison-skin, thick and 

wide; 
Boot, top, dasher, from tough old 

hide 
Found in the pit when the tanner 

died. 
That was the way he " put her 

through." — 
"There!" said the Deacon, " naow 

she '11 dew." 

Do! I tell you, I rather guess 

She was a wonder, and nothing 
less! 

Colts grew horses, beards turned 
gray, 

Deacon and deaconess dropped away, 

Children and grand-children — where 
were they? 

But there stood the stout old one-hoss- 
shay 

As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake- 
day! 



82 



HOLMES. 



Eighteen hundred; — it came and 

found 
The Deacon's masterpiece strong and 

sound. 
Eighteen hundred increased by 

ten; — 
" Hahnsum kerridge " they called it 

then. 
Eighteen hundred and twenty came; — 
Running as usual ; much the same. 
Thirty and forty at last arrive, 
And then came fifty, and fifty-five. 
Little of all we value here 
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth 

year 
Without both feeling and looking 

queer. 
In fact, there 's nothing that keeps its 

youth, 
So far as I know, but a tree and truth. 
(This is a moral that runs at large; 
Take it. — You 're welcome. — No ex- 
tra charge.) 

Yirst of November, — the Earth- 
quake-day. — 
There are traces of age in the one- 

hoss shay, 
A general flavor of mild decay, 
But nothing local, as one may say. 
There could n't be — for the Deacon's 

art 
Had made it so like in every part 
That there was n't a chance for one 

to start. 
For the wheels were just as strong as 

the thills. 
And the floor was just as strong as 

the sills, 
And the panels just as strong as the 

floor. 
And the whippletree neither less nor 

more, 
And the back-crossbar as strong as 

the fore, 
And spring and axle and hub encore 



83 



And yet, as a whole, it is past a doubt 
In another hour it will be worn out! 

First of November, 'Fifty-five ! 
This morning the parson takes a 

drive. 
Now, small boys, get out of the way ! 
Here comes the wonderful one-hoss 

shay, 
Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked 

bay. 
" Huddup ! " said the parson. — Off 

went they. 
The parson was working his Sunday's 

text, — 
Had got to fifthly, and stopped per- 
plexed 
At what the — Moses — was coming 

next. 
All at once the horse stood still, 
Close by the meet'n'-house on the hill. 

— First a shiver, and then a thrill, 
Then something decidedly like a 

spill, — 
And the parson was sitting upon a 

rock, 
At half-past nine by the meet'n'-house 

clock. — 
Just the hour of the Earthquake 

shock ! 

— What do you think the parson 

found, 
When he got up and stared around? 
The poor old chaise in a heap or 

mound, 
As if it had been to the mill and 

ground. 
You see, of course, if you 're not a 

dunce, 
How it went to pieces all at once, — 
All at once, and nothing first, — 
Just as bubbles do when they burst. 

End of the wonderful one-hoss 

shay, 
Logic is logic. That 's all I say. 



HOLMES. 



SOCIAL DISTINCTIONS. 

I think it is unpopular in this country to talk much about gentlemer and 
gentlewomen. People are touchy about social distinctions, which no doubt 
are often invidious and quite arbitrary and accidental, but which it is impos- 
sible to avoid recognizing as facts of natural history. Society stratifies itself 
everywhere, and the stratum which is generally recognized as the uppermost 
wiL be apt to have the advantage in easy grace of manner and in unassuming 
contidence, and consequently be more agreeable in the superficial relations of 
life. To compare these advantages with the virtues and utilities would be 
foolish. Much of the noblest work in life is done by ill-dressed, awkward, un- 
gainly persons; but that is no more reason for undervaluing good manners 
and what we call high-breeding, than the fact that the best part of the sturdy 
labor of the world is done by men with exceptionable hands is to be urged 
against the use of Brown Windsor as a preliminary to appearance in cultivated 
society. — From The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



Society has subdivided itself enough to have a place for every form of talent. 
Thus if a man show the least sign of ability as a sculptor or a painter, for in- 
stance, he finds the means of education and a demand for his services. Even 
a man who knows nothing but science will be provided for, if he does not 
think it necessary to hang about his birthplace all his days, — which is a most 
un-American weakness. The apron-strings of an American mother are made 
of India-rubber. Her boy belongs where he is wanted; and that young Mary- 
lander of ours spoke for all our young men, when he said that his home was 
wherever the stars and stripes blew over his head. — From The Professor 
at the Breakfast-Table. 



Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which exists in 
every community, and nothing is harder to define. The great gentlemen and 
ladies of a place are its real lords and masters and mistresses; they are the 
quality, whether in a monarchy or a republic; mayors and governors and gen- 
erals and senators and ex-presidents are nothing to them. How well we know 
this, and how seldom it finds a distinct expression! Now I tell you truly, I 
believe in man as man, and I disbelieve in all distinctions except such as fol- 
low the natural lines of cleavage in a society which has crystallized according 
to its own true laws. But the essence of equality is to be able to say the 
truth; and there is nothing more curious than these truths relating to the 
stratification of society. — From The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 

85 



HOLMES. 




FREEDOM, OUR QUEEN. 

Land where the banners wave last in the sun, 
BJazoned with star-clusters, many in one, 
Floating o'er prairie and mountain and sea; 
Hark! 'tis the voice of thy children to thee! 

Here at thine altar our vows we renew 
Still in thy cause to be loyal and true, — 
True to thy flag on the field and the wave, 
Living to honor it, dying to save! 

Mother of heroes! if perfidy's blight 
Fall on a star in thy garland of light, 
Sound but one bugle-blast! Lo! at the sign 
Armies all panoplied wheel into line! 

Hope of the world! thou hast broken its chains, — 
Wear thy bright arms while a tyrant remains, 
Stand for the right till the nations shall own 
Freedom their sovereign, with Law for her thronel 

Freedom! sweet Freedom! our voices resound, 
Queen by God's blessing, unsceptred, uncrowned! 
Freedom, sweet Freedom, our pulses repeat, 
Warm with her life-blood, as long as they beat! 

Fold the broad banner-stripes over her breast, — 
Crown her with star- jewels Queen of the West! 
Earth for her heritage, God for her friend, 
She shall reign over us, world without end! 
87 



HOLMES. 




THE TWO STREAMS. 

Behold the rocky wall 
That down its sloping sides 
Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall, 
In rushing river-tides! 

Yon stream, whose sources run 
Turned by a pebble's edge, 
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun 
Through the cleft mountain-ledge. 

The slender rill had strayed, 
But for the slanting stone, 
To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid 
Of foam-flecked Oregon. 

So from the heights of Will 
Life's parting stream descends, 
And, as a moment turns its slender rill, 
Each widening torrent bends, — 



From the same cradle's side, 
From the same mother's knee, — 
One to long darkness and the frozen tide, 
One to the Peaceful Sea! 
89 



HOLMES. 




m 



THE FRONT-DOOR AND SIDE-DOOR TO OUR FEELINGS. 

Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which they 

ly be entered. The front door is on the street. Some keep it always open; 
some keep it latched; some, locked; some bolted, — with a chain that will let 
you peep in, but not get in; and some nail it up, so that nothing can pass its 
threshold. This front-door leads into a passage which opens into an ante- 
room, and this into the interior apartments. The side-door opens at once into 
the sacred chambers. 

There is almost always at least one key to this side-door. This is carried 
for years hidden in a mother's bosom. Fathers, brothers, sisters, and friends, 
often, but by no means so universally, have duplicates of it. The wedding- 
ring conveys a right to one; alas, if none is given with it! 

If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a person 
who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly pronounce the words that 
Justice utters over its doomed victim, — The Lord have mercy on your soul) 
You will probably go mad within a reasonable time, — or, if you are a man, 
run off and die with your head on a curb-stone, in Melbourne or San Fran- 
cisco, — or, if you are a woman, quarrel and break your heart, or turn into a 
pale, jointed petrifaction that moves about as if it were alive, or play some 
real life-tragedy or other. 

Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side-door. The 
fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear to you very terrible at 
times. You can keep the world out from your front-door, or receive visitors 
only when you are ready for them; but those of your own flesh and blood, or 
of certain grades of intimacy, can come in at the side-door, if they will, at any 
hour and in any mood. Some of them have a scale of your whole nervous 
system, and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in semitones, — touch- 
ing the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of his instrument. I 
am satisfied that there are as great masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps 
or Thalberg in their lines of performance. Married life is the school in which 
the most accomplished artists in this department are found. A delicate woman 
is the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of sensibilities! 
From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on the great nerves of 
right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste are struck with a crashing 
sweep, is a range which no other instrument possesses. A few exercises on it 
daily at home fit a man wonderfully for his habitual labors, and refresh him 
immensely as he returns from them. No stranger can get a great many notes 
of torture out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well, — parent, child, 
brother, sister, intimate. Be very careful to whom you give a side-door key; 
too many have them already. — From the Autocrat of the Breakfast 
Table. 

91 



HOLMES. 



THE LAST CHARGE. 



Now, men of'the North! will you join 

in the strife 
For country, for freedom, for honor, 

for life ? 
The giant grows blind in his fury and 

spite, — 
One blow on his forehead will settle 

the fight! 

Flash full in his eyes the blue light- 
ning of steel, 

And stun him with cannon-bolts, peal 
upon peal! 

Mount, troopers, and follow your game 
to its lair, 

As the hound tracks the wolf and the 
beagle the hare! 

Blow, trumpets, your summons, till 
sluggards awake! 

Beat, drums, till the roofs of the faint- 
hearted shake! 

Yet, yet, ere the signet is stamped on 
the scroll, 

Their names may be traced on the 
blood-sprinkled roll! 



Trust not the false herald that painted 

your shield: 
True honor to-day must be sought on 

the field! 
Her scutcheon shows white with a 

blazon of red, — 
The life-drops of crimson for liberty 

shed ! 

The hour is at hand, and the moment 

draws nigh; 
The dog- star of treason grows dim in 

the sky; 
Shine forth from the battle- cloud, 

light of the morn, 
Call back the bright hour when the 

Nation was born! 

The rivers of peace through our val- 
leys shall run, 

As the glaciers of tyranny melt in the 
sun; 

Smite, smite the proud parricide down 
from his throne, — 

His sceptre once broken, the world is 
our own ! 
1864. 




93 



HOLMES. 




THE SEA-SHORE AND THE MOUNTAINS. 

I have lived by the sea-shore and by the mountains. — No, I am not 

going to say which is best. The one where your place is is the best for you. 
But this difference there is: you can domesticate mountains, but the sea is 
ferce naturae. You may have a hut, or know the owner of one, on the moun- 
tain-side; you see a light half-way up its ascent in the evening, and you know 
there is a home, and you might share it. You have noted certain trees, per- 
haps; you know the particular zone where the hemlocks look so black in Oc- 
tober, when the maples and beeches have faded. All its reliefs and intaglios 
have electrotyped themselves in the medallions that hang round the walls of 
your memory's chamber. — The sea remembers nothing. It is feline. It licks 
your feet, — its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but it will crack 
your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its 
jaws as if nothing had happened. The mountains give their lost children ber- 
ries and water ; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die. The mountains 
have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has a fascinating, treacher- 
ous intelligence. The mountains lie about like huge ruminants, their broad 
backs awful to look upon, but safe to handle. The sea smooths its silver 
scales until you cannot see their joints, — but their shining is that of a snake's 
belly, after all. — In deeper suggestiveness I find as great a difference. The 
mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the procession of its long genera- 
tions. The sea drowns out humanity and time; it has no sympathy with 
either; for it belongs to eternity, and of that it sings its monotonous song for- 
ever and ever. — From The Professor at the Breakfast Table. 




HOLMES. 




BOSTON COMMON. — THREE PICTURES. 

FOR THE FAIR IN AID OF THE FUND TO PROCURE BALL'S STATUE OF 

WASHINGTON. 



1630. 

All overgrown with bush and fern, 
And straggling clumps of tangled 
trees, 
With trunks that lean and boughs 
that turn, 
Bent eastward by the mastering 
breeze, — 
With spongy bogs that drip and fill 
A yellow pond with muddy rain, 
Beneath the shaggy southern hill 
Lies wet and low the Shawmut 
plain. 
And hark! the trodden branches 
crack ; 
A crow flaps off with startled 
scream ; 
A straying woodchuck canters back; 

A bittern rises from the stream ; 
Leaps from his lair a frightened deer; 

An otter plunges in the pool; — 

Here comes old Shawmut' s pioneer, 

The parson on his brindled bull ! 

1774. 

The streets are thronged with tramp- 
ling feet, 
The northern hill is ridged with 
graves, 
But night and morn the drum is beat 
To frighten down the "rebel 
knaves," 
The stones of King Street still are 
red, 
And yet the bloody red-coats come: 
I hear their pacing sentry's tread, 

The click of steel, the tap of drum, 
And over all the open green, 



Where grazed of late the harmless 
kine, 
The cannon's deepening ruts are seen, 
The war-horse stamps, the bayonets 
shine, 
The clouds are dark with crimson 
rain 
Above the murderous hirelings' den, 
And soon their whistling showers shall 
stain 
The pipe- clayed belts of Gage's 
men. 

186—. 

Around the green, in morning light, 
The spired and palaced summits 
blaze, 
And, sunlike, from her Beacon-height 
The dome-crowned city spreads her 
rays ; 
They span the waves, they belt the 
plains, 
They skirt the roads with bands of 
white, 
Till with a flash of gilded panes 
Yon farthest hillside bounds the 
sight. 
Peace, Freedom, Wealth! no fairer 
view, 
Though with the wild-bird's restless 
wings 
We sailed beneath the noontide's blue 
Or chased the moonlight's endless 
rings! 
Here, fitly raised by grateful hands 

His holiest memory to recall, 
The Hero's, Patriot's image stands; 
He led our sires who won them all' 
November 14, 1859. 



97 



HOLMES. 



CONVERSATION. 

I really believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being too pre- 
cious for conversation. What do you think an admiring friend said the other 
day to one that was talking good things, — good enough to print? " Why," 
said he, " you are wasting merchantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, 
as nearly as I can tell, of fifty dollars an hour." The talker took him to the 
window and asked him to look out and tell what he saw. 

" Nothing but a very dusty street," he said, "and a man driving a sprink- 
ling-machine through it." 

II Why don't you tell the man he is wasting that water? What would be 
the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our thought-sprinklers 
through them with the valves open, sometimes? 

"Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you forget. It 
shapes our thoughts for us ; — the waves of conversation roll them as the surf 
rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the image a little. I rough 
out my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay. Spoken language is so 
plastic, — you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill 
np, and stick on so easily, when you work that soft material, that there is 
nothing like it for modelling. Out of it come the shapes which you turn into 
marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to write such. Or, 
to use another illustration, writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle : 
you may hit your reader's mind, or miss it; — but talking is like playing at 
a mark with the pipe of an engine : if it is within reach, and you have time 
enough, you can't help hitting it." 

From The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 



What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to give as 
much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two talkers as the 
time will let him. From The Professor at the Breakfast Table. 



Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind, and listen to 
what others say about subjects you have studied but recently. Knowledge 
and timber should n't be much used till they are seasoned. 

From The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 
99 



HOLMES. 




MANNERS. 



Though books on manners are 
not out of print, 

An honest tongue may drop a harm- 
less hint. 
Stop not, unthinking, every friend 
you meet, 

To spin your wordy fabric in the 
street ; 

While you are emptying your collo- 
quial pack, 

The fiend Lumbago jumps upon his 
back. 
Nor cloud his features with the un- 
welcome tale 

Of how he looks, if haply thin and 
pale; 

Health is a subject for his child, his 
wife, 

And the rude office that insures his 
life. 
Look in his face, to meet thy neigh- 
bor's soul, 

Not on his garments, to detect a hole; 

" How to observe," is what t>hy pages 
show, 

Pride of thy sex, Miss Harriet Mar- 
tineau! 

O, what a precious book the one would 
be 

That taught observers what they 're 
not to see ! 

I tell in verse, — 't were better done 

in prose, — 
One curious trick that everybody 

knows; 
Once form this habit, and it 's very 

strange 



How long it sticks, how hard it is to 
change. 

Two friendly people, both disposed to 
smile, 

Who meet, like others, every little 
while, 

Instead of passing with a pleasant 
bow, 

And " How d' ye do? " or " How 's 
your uncle now? " 

Impelled by feelings in their nature 
kind, 

But slightly weak, and somewhat un- 
defined, 

Rush at each other, make a sudden 
stand, 

Begin to talk, expatiate, and expand; 

Each looks quite radiant, seems ex- 
tremely struck, 

Their meeting so was such a piece of 
luck; 

Each thinks the other thinks he 's 
greatly pleased 

To screw the vice in which they both 
are squeezed; 

So there they talk, in dust, or mud, or 
snow, 

Both bored to death, and both afraid 
to go! 
Your hat once lifted, do not hang 
your fire, 

Nor, like slow Ajax, fighting still, re- 
tire ; 

When your old castor on your crowr. 
yo'i clap, 

Go off; you 've mounted your percus- 
sion cap. 



101 



HOLMES. 




W ri 



Father of Mercies, Heavenly Friend, 
We seek Thy gracious throne; 

To Thee our faltering prayers ascend, 
Our fainting hearts are known ! 



PARTING HYMN. 

"Dundee." 

Our blood their flowing veins will 
shed, 
Their wounds our breasts will share; 
O, save us from the woes we dread, 
Or "rant us strength to bear! 



From blasts that chill, from suns that 
smite, 

From every plague that harms; 
In camp and march, in siege and fight, 

Protect our men-at-arms ! 

Though from our darkened lives they 
take 

What makes our life most dear, 
We yield them for their country's sake 

With no relenting tear. 



Let each unhallowed cause that brings 
The stern destroyer cease, 

Thy flaming angel fold his wings, 
And seraphs whisper Peace! 

Thine are the sceptre and the sword, 
Stretch forth Thy mighty hand, — 

Reign Thou our kingless nation's 
Lord, 
Rule Thou our throneless land! 




103 



HOLMES. 




BREAKFAST TABLE TALK. 
[From the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.] 
I know nothing in English or any other literature more admirable than *hat 
sentiment of Sir Thomas Browne, " Every man truly lives, so long as 

HE ACTS HIS NATURE, OR SOME WAY MAKES GOOD THE FACULTIES OF HIM- 
SELF." I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, 
as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must 
sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, —but we must sail, 
and not drift, nor lie at anchor. 

I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every day of earth, 
with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of births, — with its 
loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs and blisses, has more of 
humanity in it than all the books that were ever written, put together. 

There are times in which every active mind feels itself above any and all 
human books. 

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It 
has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations. 

The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to be gov- 
erned, not by but according to laws, such as we observe in the larger universe. 

Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable 
things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation 
with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in 
cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant truths 
from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them. Good-breeding never 
forgets that amour-propre is universal. When you read the story of the Arch- 
bishop and Gil Bias, you may laugh, if you will, at the poor old man's delu- 
sion; but don't forget that the youth was the greater fool of the two, and that 
his master served such a booby rightly in turning him out of doors. 

Beware of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you condemn may 
be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath the 
same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten windfalls. 

105 



LEAFLETS FROM STANDARD AUTHORS. 

.There is no elasticity in a mathematical fact; if you bring up against it, it 
never yields a hair's breadth; everything must go to pieces that comes in col- 
lision with it. 

Facts always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts about 
facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the finger on the key and the 
man of facts asserts his true dignity. 

Whenever the wandering demon of Drunkenness finds a ship adrift, — no 
steady wind in its sails, no thoughtful pilot directing its course, — he steps on 
board, takes the helm, and steers straight for the maelstrom. 

At thirty we are all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the walls of 
ihis tenement of life; twenty years later we have carved it, or shut up our 
jack-knives. Then we are ready to help others, and care less to hinder any, 
because nobody's elbows are in our way. 

[From the Professor at the Breakfast Table.] 

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch ; nay, you may 
kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full at evening. 

Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, 
and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace. 

A noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop of blood, under the 
miscroscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a 
calculation. The counting by the micrometer took him a week. — You have, 
my full-^rown friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, run- 
ning on your vital errands day and night as long as you live, sixty-five bil- 
lions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions. 

There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of children. For 
the first time in your lives you learn some fact or come across some idea. 
Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact or idea strikes you from an- 
other quarter. It seems as if it had passed into space and bounded back upon 
you as an echo from the blank wall that shuts in the world of thought. Yet 
no possible connection exists between the two channels by which the thought 
or the fact arrived. 

A great many things we say can be made to appear contradictory, simply 
because they are partial views of a truth, and may often look unlike at first, 
as a front view of a face and its profile often do. 

The grandest objects of sense and thought are common to all climates and 
civilizations. The sky, the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death, love, 
the hope and vision of eternity, — these are images that write themselves it 
poetry in every soul which has anything of the divine gift. 

106 



HOLMES. 



CLUSTER OF QUOTATIONS. 



The noblest service comes from name- 
less hands, 

And the best servant does his work 
unseen. 
Wind-Clouds and Star-Drifts. 

No life worth naming ever comes to 

good 
If always nourished on the selfsame 

food. The Mind's Diet. 

He who reads right will rarely look 

upon 
A better poet than his lexicon ! 

Poetry. 

Knowledge dwells with length of 

days; 
Wisdom walks in ancient ways. 

Banquet to Chinese Embassy. 

Minds roll in paths like planets ; 
they revolve 
This in a larger, that a narrower ring. 
Wind- Clouds and Star-Drifts. 

We, like the leaf, the summit, or the 

wave, 
Reflect the light our common nature 

gave, 
But every sunbeam, falling from her 

throne, 
Wears on our hearts some coloring of 

our own. Poetry. 

How the wild swayings of our planet 

show 
That worlds unseen surround the 

world we know. 

Our Limitations. 



Heaven asks no surplice round the 

heart that feels, 
And all is holy where devotion kneels. 

Poetry. 

107 



The Pilgrim's hallowed shore, 
Though strewn with weeds, is granite 

at the core; 
O rather trust that he who made her 

free 
Will keep her true, as long as fait! 

shall be ! A Rhymed Lesson 

O trembling Faith! though dark tin 
morn, 
A heavenly torch is thine. 

The Pilgrim's Vision 

Faith loves to lean on Time's destroy- 
ing arm, 

And age, like distance, lends a double 
charm. A Rhymed Lesson. 

We see that Time robs us, we know 
that he cheats, 

But we still find a charm in his pleas- 
ant deceits, 

While he leaves the remembrance of 
all that was best, 

Love, friendship, and hope, and the 
promise of rest. 

Our Banker. 

Be his titles what they will, 
In spite of manhood's claim 

The graybeard is a school-boy still 
And loves his school-boy name. 
The Fountain of Youth. 

Lord, let War's tempest cease, 
Fold the whole Earth in peace 

Under thy wings! 

Make all Thy nations one, 

All hearts beneath the sun, 

Till Thou shalt reign alone, 

Great King of kings! 

International Ode. 



Books on Patriotic Subjects 

i AM AN AMERICAN 

By Sara Cone Bryant {Mrs. Theodore F. Borst). 

" Americanism," says Mrs. Borst, " needs to be taught as definrlely 
as do geography and arithmetic. The grade teachers are doing 
splendid work for patriotism, with songs and recitations, story- 
telling, and talks on civic virtues. I have tried to give them some- 
thing°more definite and coordinated, something that will serve as a 
real textbook on ' Being an American.' " 

STORIES Oif PATRIOTISM. 

Edited by Norma H. Deming, and Katharine I. Bemis. 

A series of stirring tales of patriotic deeds by Americans from the 
time of the colonists to the present. There are also stories about 
famous heroes of our Allies in the Great War. 

THE PATRIOTIC READER. 

Edited by Katharine I. Bemis, Mathilde E. Holtz, and Henry 

L. Smith. 

The selections cover the history of our country from Colonial 
times. A distinguishing feature is the freshness of material and the 
admirable arrangement. The book gives one a familiarity with 
literature that presents the highest ideals of freedom, justice, and 
liberty. 

THE LITTLE BOOK OF THE FLAG. 

By Eva March Tappan 

In her own entertaining style, Miss Tappan has written the story 
of Our Flag. She tells children how to behave toward the flag, in a 
fashion that makes such behavior a sacred duty. There are selec- 
tions for Reading and Memorizing. 

A COURSE IN CITIZENSHIP AND PATRIOTISM. 

Edited by E. L. Cabot, F. F„ Andrews, F. E. Coe, M. Hill, and M. 

McSkimmon. 

Good citizenship grows out of love of country and in turn pro- 
motes the spirit of internationalism. This book teaches hew to de- 
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AMERICANIZATION AND CITIZENSHIP. 

By Hanson Hart Webster. 

" Well calculated to inculcate love for America, especially among 
the foreign born. This is to be desired at this time more than eve* 
bef ore." — His Eminence, James Cardinal Gihbons. 



HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 



THE TAPPAN-KENDALL HISTORIES 

By EVA MARCH TAPPAN, Ph.D., and CALVIN N. KENDALL, LL.D. 

Book I. American Hero Stories. {For Grades 1V-V.) ■ 

By Eva March Tappan. Price, 60 cents. Postpaid. 
A logical introduction to Miss Tappan 's An Elementary History of Our Country 
The stories are chronologically arranged and appealingly told. 

Book II, An Elementary History of Our Country. {For Grades 
V-VI.) 

By Eva March Tappan. Price 68 cents. Postpaid. 
A short, connected, and interesting story of the course of events in our history since 
the discovery of America. The narrative is simple, and makes a special appeal through its 
anecdotes of great men. There are numerous stimulating suggestions for written work. 

Book III. Our European Ancestors. {For Grade VI.) 

By Eva March Tappan. Price 76 cents. Postpaid. 
The historical bond of union between Europe and America is adequately developed in 
this book. In every detail the book follows the course in history laid down for the sixth 
grade by the Committee of Eight of the American Historical Association. 

Book IV. History of the United States for Grammar Schools. 

{For Grades VII- VIII.) Price $1.20. Postpaid. 

By Reuben Gold Thwaites, LL.D., and Calvin N. Kendall, LL.D. 

There is an adequate and up-to-date account of our social and industrial development 
and authoritative chapters on the Great War. This history combines accurate scholarship, 
unusual interest, and a most complete and helpful teaching equipment. 



TIMELY BOOKS OF PATRIOTIC INTEREST 

I Am An American. [For Grades V-VI.) 

By Sara Cone Bryant (Mrs. Theodore F. Borst) . . . . $.60 

Stories of Patriotism. {For Grades V-VI.) 

Compiled by Norma H. Deming and Katharine I. Bemis ... .56 

The Patriotic Reader. {For Grades VII-VI II and Junior High Schools.) 
Compiled by K. I. Bemis, M. E. Holtz, and H. L. Smith, Ph.D. . .56 

The Little Book of the Flag. {For Grades VI, VII, VIII) 

By Eva March Tappan .44 

The Lit'tle Book of the War. {For Grades VII-VIII and Junior High 
Schools.) By Eva March Tappan .60 

American Ideals. {For High Schools.) 

Edited by Norman Foerster and W. W. Pierson, Jr. ... 1.25 

Liberty, Peace, and Justice. {For High Schools.) 

Speeches and Addresses on Democracy and Patriotism, 1776-1918. River- 
side Literature Series, No. 261 ... Paper, .20. Cloth, .32 

A Treasury of War Poetry. {For High Schools.) 

British and American Poems of the World War. Edited by George Her- 
bert Clarke. Riverside Literature Series, No. 262 . . Cloth, .52 

Americanization and Citizenship. 

Lessons in Community and National Ideals for New Americans. Ry 
Hanson Hart Webster Paper, .40. Cloth, ,50 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 



"A Step Forward In Reading" 



THE RIVERSIDE READERS 

EDITED BY 

JAMES H. VAN SICKLE 

Superintendent of Schools, Springfield, Mast. 
AND 

WILHELMINA SEEGMILLER 

Latt Director of Art, Indianapolis. Formerly Principal of the IV'althy Avenue Pub- 
lic School, Grand Rapids, Mich. 

ASSISTED BY 

FRANCES JENKINS 

Instructor in Elementary Education, College for Teachers, University of Cincinnati. 
Formerly Supervisor of Elementary Grades, Decatur, III. 

ILLUSTRATED BY 

Ruth Mary Hallock Clara E. Atwood 

Maginel Wright Enright E. Boyd Smith 
Howard Pyle, and other notable artists 

Fresh Material 

These Readers contain an unusually large amount of fresh copyrighted material 
taken from the world's best literature for children. 

Latest Teaching Methods 

They represent the latest developments in the methods of teaching reading, the 
kind of teaching that will be found in the best schools of to-day. 

Artistic Make-up 

Artistically the books will set a new standard in textbook making. The colored 
illustrations of the primary books are particularly attractive. 

Mechanical Features 

The paper used in the books, the type for each grade, and the dimensions anc 
arrangement of the type page were all determined by careful experimenting, in orde' 
to safeguard the eyesight of children. 

Send for complete illustrated circular. 

PRIMER FOURTH READER 

FIRST READER FIFTH READER 

SECOND READER SIXTH READER 

THIRD READER SEVENTH READER 

EIGHTH READER 



HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 



The Boys' and Girls' Readers 

By EMMA MILLER BOLENIUS 
"Train your Pupils in Silent Reading" 



Fourth Reader Sixth Reader 

Fifth Reader Teachers' Manual 



C, A series of basal readers for the Fourth, Fifth, and 
Sixth Grades — the crucial years in gaining skill in silent 
reading, and fluency in oral reading. 

C. Miss Bolenius, widely recognized as an expert, has been 
guided by her study of the most authoritative and up-to-date 
reports, investigations, courses of study, and surveys. 

C In the three Readers there is full study equipment 
with each article, story, or poem. Into this equipment, 
the editor has succeeded in bringing her own personal touch 
She makes reading a delight for both pupil and teacher. 

C Four major objects of the Bolenius Readers are: 

(i) To direct silent reading, (2) To motivate oral reading, 
(3) To develop the reading habit in children, and (4) To 
broaden the child's outlook on life. 

C Practical everyday reading of various kinds is stressed. 
The illustrations are full of teaching value and appeal. 
Typographical aids make reading easier for the child. How 
to study is given special attention, and supervised study 
has been developed in an entirely new way. 

H In the Teachers 1 Manual there is help so concrete that 
even inexperienced teachers will secure results. It presents 
a practical methodology for silent reading. 



HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 



